March brings the first soft breezes and crocus buds of spring, as the earth awakens after its winter-long sleep. I can only assume this new season of life and fertility explains why the Agricultural Council of America has named March 21, often the first day of spring, as "National Agriculture Day." But how much do you really know about farming? In honor of the equinox, Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings is here to plant some seeds of knowledge among your weeds of agricultural ignorance.
The Debunker: Was Daylight Saving Time Instituted for Farmers?
Okay, first of all, it's not "daylight savings time." It's "daylight saving time," singular, according to the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which standardized the summertime clock shift in the United States. (Other countries mostly call it "summer time.") And Benjamin Franklin didn't invent it. He did write a 1784 essay called "An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light" for The Journal of Paris, noting that it was a waste of time to sleep through so much morning daylight in the summer—so why not take his trademark "early to bed, early to rise" advice and kick it up a notch? But (a) he was just joking around, and (b) he was proposing getting people out of bed earlier, not actually changing all the clocks. Serious talk about springing forward and falling back was still a century away.
But that's all entry-level stuff. The real daylight saving misinformation victimizes American agriculture. As the story goes, the clock shift was demanded by farmers, who needed more daylight hours in the summertime. This trope gets trotted out by journalists and even legislators every March and November. "I always thought we did it for the farmers," confessed no less an authority than Michael Downing, author of the 2005 book Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time.
In fact, that couldn't be more untrue. As Downing reveals in his book, farmers hate daylight saving time, the way Scrooge hates Christmas and Jeffrey Lebowski hates the Eagles. In fact, their vocal lobby is the reason the U.S. never had permanent daylight saving time until 1966. Daylight saving time was first adopted during World War I to save fuel for the war effort, but it caught on with retailers, commuters, and everyone who enjoy tourism and the outdoors (or profits from them) during the summer months. Farmers, however, were just fine with early morning daylight. On any given day, it gives them more time to get crops in from the field and to market before everyone else's business hours begin. Besides, hired hands and especially dairy cows adjusted poorly to the time shifts in spring and fall. So don't slander farmers by blaming daylight saving time on them. It exists over their deeply felt objections, no doubt delivered in laconic Midwestern-accented English through teeth clenched on a blade of wheat.
Quick Quiz: What U.S. state, which ranks #43 in agricultural production, is the only one to observe daylight saving time nowhere within its borders?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.