Farming Matters. . . in the U.S. Survey

What do you think of when I say “farmer”? What does the farmer do? What is the farmer’s life like? What do you think of when I say “yeoman farmer”?

Today I want to trace the features of the “yeoman farmer” ideal and the influence it has had on American life. This ideal is important to understand because industrialized agriculture is often understood as the very opposite of the yeoman ideal. For our purposes, we will start with Thomas Jefferson’s version of this ideal, because it has shown remarkable staying power. The point is not really to talk about Jefferson, or the eighteenth century (this is, after all, a mostly twentieth-century course), but to outline an ideal that has taken hold of the American imagination. Increasingly today, even when talking with non-historians, you will hear references to it, to “yeomen” or “agrarians” or even “family farms”—all (whether acknowledged or unacknowledged) references to Jefferson. What was this “yeoman farmer” ideal? I will make four points here.

First, and most obviously, the yeoman was close to the land. He (for as an ideal, the yeoman farmer was almost never female) tilled the soil with his own labor and the labor of his family. He had a connection with the earth that city people and manufacturers did not have.

Second, Jefferson’s yeoman was independent. He provided some or most of his subsistence. He was not a tenant or an agricultural worker, working for wages or a share of the crop. He was not wealthy either. He was, to use our terminology, solidly middle class. In some respects Jefferson defined the yeoman in opposition to the great planters of the South, who owned slaves and vast estates, and were more occupied with managing labor than cultivating the earth.

Third he was literate, informed, and moral. He might be familiar with the classics, but he was at least a reader of newspapers and aware of politics. And because he was moral, he could be counted on to see through the deception and corruption of urban politics. For this reason, Jefferson (and many agrarians since) saw the yeoman farmer as the crucial building block of American democracy. Without landowning self-sufficient farmers, the nation could succumb to corrupt absolutism.

Fourth, I want to point just briefly to a couple of ways the agrarian ideal informed policy in the nineteenth century. The Homestead Act of 1862 essentially gave away 160 acres of western land to anyone who would improve it and remain on it for five years. You can see that one of the intentions here was to fill the West with yeoman farmers. Incidentally, it failed on this account: only 80 million of the 500 million acres distributed went to homesteaders. The Dawes Commission of 1893 also paid homage to the independent farmer: it proposed to reorganize Indian reservations as individual homesteads, thereby transforming the Indians into good yeomen. This, too, failed.

We will be discussing the “industrialization” of agriculture in this course, so in closing, I offer a quick overview of what I take to be the major features of industrialized agriculture: mechanization, standardization, distant (national or international) markets, specialization (monocropping), large chemical and/or fossil fuel inputs, and wage labor.

II. From Crop to Commodity

As the 1862 Homestead Act might suggest, the yeoman farmer was the one who was supposed to settle the western frontier. But this frontiersman was an economic creature; markets drove the settlement of former Indian lands in the West. To discuss the frontier and the standardization of agricultural products, let’s take a look at Chicago. The fastest-growing city in the country in the late nineteenth century, Chicago and the grid of land settlement in its vast hinterland (stretching as far away as Minnesota) “turned the prairie into a commodity”, to use William Cronon’s phrase. Farmers plowed the plains and fed the metropolises. The industrialization of farming first appeared in the late nineteenth century on the Great Plains and in California, due primarily to two factors: mechanization, and standardization.

The first, mechanization is probably the most familiar to you. This is the story of John Deere and his steel plow, Cyrus McCormick and his mechanical harvester. Wheat was relatively easy to grow with fresh soil, needing little maintenance beyond planting and harvesting. In the case of the wheat farms of California and the Great Plains, mechanization made it possible for fewer people to farm much larger pieces of land. There are stories of fields so expansive that after working through one plot, a plow team would camp out at the far end of the field before returning the next day.

The second way that western agriculture industrialized was through standardization. Some form of standardization characterized nearly every agricultural product, but grain provides an extreme example. In order to understand the transformation involved here, we must take note of “the seemingly unremarkable fact that shippers loaded their grain into sacks” initially. After harvesting his wheat, the farmer delivered it in a sack, on a wagon, over seasonal roads, to the river. The farmer bore the responsibility of getting it sold in Chicago (though he might pay someone else to do it); the grain bore the imprint of his farm. He might get a higher or lower price depending on its quality. And humans labored to load and unload sacks. Relatively speaking, getting one’s grain to market was an arduous but personal process.

As Chicago’s hinterland grew more and more grain, railroads changed the way it was shipped. Instead of sacks, the grain was loaded directly into railcars along with grain from other farmers. This method was simpler not only for loading, but also for unloading: in Chicago, steam-powered elevators lifted the grain into vast warehouses. The sack of grain had become a golden stream. Soon elevator receipts were as good as cash, and then better than cash, as Chicagoans learned how to make money off of grain futures, founding the Chicago Board of Trade. Suddenly, grain had been transformed. As environmental historian William Cronon put it, “To understand wheat or corn in the vocabulary of bulls, bears, corners, grades, and futures meant seeing grain as a commodity, not as a living organism planted and harvested by farmers as a crop for people to mill into flour, bake into bread, and eat.”

But the increasing dominance of urban capitalists in this industrialized agriculture and the fierce droughts of the late nineteenth century led to a kind of farmers’ revolt: the Populist movement. Populism’s influence peaked in 1892, when the People’s Party presidential nominee James B. Weaver won over a million votes. Although the Populist movement had fragmented and melted into the Democratic Party by 1896, their “ agrarian statist agenda”—federal regulation of railroads and other monopolies, federal credit for farmers, and agricultural extension agents, helped set the stage for the Progressive reforms of the early 1900s. Feeling hard-pressed by monopoly capitalism, these erstwhile self-sufficient yeomen turned to the government to defend their interests. As we will see, this agrarian statism would prove to be a significant development in the industrialization of agriculture.

III. The Subversion of the Ideal: Intensive Monocropping

I want to start today with a man named Johann Heinrich von Thünen. This nineteenth century German geographer theorized how agriculture works economically and spatially by imagining a generic city on a featureless plain. This “isolated state,” von Thünen thought, would be surrounded by successive rings of agricultural systems, which owed their location to land and transportation costs. Thus, agriculture nearest the city involved intensive dairy farming and market gardening, then extensive grain growing, then open range livestock raising, then forestry, and finally, hunting and fishing. This makes sense, right? The heavier products are grown very intensively (close together, in small patches) very close to the city. A farmer here needs high-value crops, because land rent is so high. Wheat farmers and cattle ranchers, in contrast, need less profit per acre, but they need to grow it in larger quantities to make it worth shipping.

Brooklyn, New York, was once the nation’s most productive farmland. Surprising as it sounds, Brooklyn was—at least in the warmer months—essentially New York City’s backyard garden from the 1870s until the 1910s. By the 1870s, New York (and other urban areas) were so densely populated that people could no longer grow gardens in their yards, or keep pigs in the streets. So places like Brooklyn took up the slack, meeting urban demand with 60-acre farms that led the nation in yield per acre. New York City and Brooklyn shared a symbiotic relationship: the dung of the City’s mighty horse fleet (over a million pounds a day) fertilized Brooklyn’s fields, which yielded the produce that New Yorkers desired. Brooklyn seems to have fit von Thünen’s pattern perfectly.

What von Thünen did not anticipate, however, is the efficiency of railroads and the advent of the refrigerated rail car, which together effectively collapsed time and space. Soon Brooklyn’s agriculture gave way to the city we know today, and the growing of fresh produce spread south, to New Jersey, the Delmarva peninsula, Georgia, and Florida. There was increasingly a national market for almost all agricultural goods, not just wheat, corn, and livestock.

But the rule of distant markets—and the industrialization of agriculture as a whole—reached its apex in California. One could hardly get further away from the population centers of the Atlantic coast, and yet California has led U.S. production of some agricultural product from the 1860s until the present. California, in the words of historian Steven Stoll argues, became “the ultimate city-serving countryside.” Because the agricultural and economic systems pioneered in California have come to characterize American agriculture as a whole, we will spend a lot of time discussing the Golden State.

Industrialized California agriculture implied a thorough division of labor; interdependence between regions, businesses, government, and individuals; specialization in single cash crops; and, most importantly, intensification. Rather than extending their holdings by seeking new lands (which had been the general practice in the U.S.—think pioneers and the breaking of the plains), growers applied capital and technology to “rend every possible dollar” from existing land. Although incredibly productive, industrial agriculture also required a series of supporting structures—which California growers and all levels of government obligingly developed and sustained in the early twentieth century. High yields translated into a need for massive quantities of short-term labor, and as we will see, growers worked to ensure a ready supply of exploitable workers. The danger of overproduction led growers to form marketing associations that created demand through advertising. Monoculture along with exotic botanical imports effectively laid out a feast for a variety of pests and diseases; growers, in response, lobbied for breeding and chemical research programs through the USDA and local universities. The cultivator that emerged in California in the twentieth century was the agribusinessman (a term coined in the 1950s), seemingly far removed from the yeoman farmer ideal.

The federal government proved a powerful ally of industrial agriculturalists in the West and the South alike. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was created in 1862 as a cabinet level agency; the Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 created agricultural and mechanical colleges (like the University of Georgia) throughout the nation; the Hatch Act of 1887 created a system of agricultural experiment stations; and the 1914 Smith-Lever Act created the cooperative extension service, which in theory placed a USDA agent in every farming county across the nation. The twentieth century has seen an agricultural version of the “iron triangle”, in which agribusiness interest groups provide funding and votes for congressmen and women, who in turn pass legislation favoring the USDA, who then pursues agribusiness-friendly policies. This “iron triangle” is reinforced by a revolving door of employment: the lobbyists, educators, and USDA bureaucrats who maintain the system have often been the same people.

IV. The Subversion of the Ideal: Labor in Industrialized Agriculture

Perhaps nowhere was the state more active in supporting industrial agriculture than in its adjudication of labor relations. And, some have argued, nowhere was agriculture more industrial than in its labor relations: “it was the experience of becoming employers, more than changes in methods, markets, and crops,” historian Cindy Hahmovitch contends, “that made a business of farming.”

The farm labor problem reached epic proportions in California. During the Great Depression, thousands of Midwesterners fled the environmental and social degradation of the Dust Bowl for California. They hoped for a better living in the famously abundant Golden State, but California proved a bitter disappointment. The living and working conditions were miserable, and the migrants’ powerlessness before their agricultural employers made them vulnerable to exploitation and hunger. In the midst of this “Okie” influx, southern California’s citrus growers piled their unprofitable, superfluous fruit into great mountains, doused them with kerosene, and set them aflame. For these refugees, the destruction of food must have been a shock.

At least it came as a shock to a group of middle-class reformers. For novelist John Steinbeck, journalist Carey McWilliams, photographer Dorothea Lange, and economist Paul Taylor (among others), this “American exodus” of dust bowl migrants was deeply disturbing. In California’s labor camps, these reformers saw not only gut-wrenching deprivation but also the agrarian ideal of an independent yeomanry gone terribly awry. The dust bowl migrants were mostly of European descent, the seeming progeny of America’s great pioneers and the presumptive backbone of American democracy. Rather than finding a land amenable to self-sufficient family, farming, the migrants seemed condemned to perpetual wage peonage.

This apparent subversion of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal was what McWilliams called “the hidden California.” Rather than farms, the state’s agricultural enterprises were “Factories in the Field,” especially in the way they structured labor relations. Not only were farm workers prevented from becoming independent yeomen, the landowners likewise subverted the yeoman ideal by using violent “farm fascism” to control labor and produce their “Gunkist Oranges”, to use McWilliams’ vivid language.

The dust bowl migrants received the most national attention for their plight, but they represented just the latest in a series of labor pools that formed what one historian has called the “unhappy fraternity” of powerlessness, bound together by “occupational immobility.” Chinese immigrants dominated the California agricultural workforce until the 1880s, then Japanese immigrants until the early 1900s, then Mexicans and Filipinos through the 1930s.

In this way the industrialization of agriculture became an important “pull” factor for Asian and Mexican immigrants. But because these foreigners did not fit the vision of what America ought to be—that is, of European derivation—U.S. government officials sought to restrict their entry. The first tactic was to block certain groups altogether, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and continuing with the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan, in which the Japanese promised to keep laborers from emigrating. But the Johnson Reed Act of 1924 introduced a new system of quotas based on national origin, creating the notion of illegal alien: “simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility,” to quote a prominent immigration historian. During World War II, the federal government addressed labor shortages by introducing the Mexican bracero (guest worker) program, which fashioned a state-sponsored “transnational Mexican labor force”—a kind of “imported colonialism.”

Whatever color they were, farmworkers in industrial agriculture were always among the most vulnerable, oppressed people in the nation. In part this was the responsibility of the landowners, who generally exploited farm labor whenever possible; in part labor unions were at fault for ignoring farmworkers or using ill-advised organizational methods. But as historians have pointed out, the state also played a key role. After the Civil War, the USDA effectively “became the mouthpiece of the nation’s most reactionary farmers” (primarily “white southern men”). Through labor allocation systems, control of federal relief funds, and outright strikebreaking, the USDA helped remake the U.S. in the South’s image, using “intimidation and coercion” to maintain a pliable workforce. The 1935 Wagner Act, for example, which granted labor unions the right to organize, explicitly excluded farmworkers. Without a means of organizing their own protests, farmworkers suffered an extreme disadvantage in improving their working and living conditions. “Farmworkers struggled without federal sanction,” Hahamovitch argues, “and as a result they were fatally weak.”

V. The Present: Food Riots, the Countercuisine Critique, and Industrial Organic

Though I am running out of space and time, I would like to conclude our discussion with a nod to present concerns with food production. How does the rise of the organic food, for example, relate to industrial agriculture? In the last twenty years, sustainable, chemical-free, humane food production has moved from critiquing to manifesting industrial capitalism. Just go into a Whole Foods supermarket and buy a half gallon of Horizon Organic Milk—made by agribusiness giant Dean Foods with non-petroleum-based inputs, but using essentially industrial methods. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a very useful text for discussing this “industrial organic” agriculture.

One other recent phenomenon deserves attention. What do food riots have to do with industrial agriculture? Don’t we need more industrial-scale food production in order to feed the world’s hungry? There is a fair argument to this effect, but it is also worth pointing out that industrial agriculture created many of the conditions for rising food costs. By yoking agriculture to fossil fuels, industrial methods have grafted it into the global economy. Suddenly a war in the Middle East can translate into higher prices for rice in Haiti. In addition, the exportation of industrial agriculture to developing nations—the so-called “Green Revolution” of the latter twentieth century—may have increased production, but at the cost of undermining local food systems. The Green Revolution has thus made developing nations more vulnerable to the vagaries of global capitalism.

The way we get food has changed fundamentally over the last hundred years, and this transformation has formed an integral part of modern U.S. history. It is apparent, I hope, that understanding the history of industrial agriculture also helps to make sense of the present.

NOTES:
Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 8.
James Cobb, Seminar in U.S. History, 15 April 2008.
“Homestead Act (1862)”, accessed on 4/30/08 at http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=31
See Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
Wlliam Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 102.
Cronon, 107.
Cronon, 146.
Elizabeth Sanders, The Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 174.
Cronon, 48.
Shane Hamilton, “Market Gardening, Or Why New Jersey is Called the ‘Garden State’”, Food and Power Lecture, 4 February 2008. See also Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); and Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xii.
Ibid., xiii.
See Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage; Douglas Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmers Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
See Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage.
Shane Hamilton, “Pork Politics, Pork Population”, Food and Power Lecture, 26 March 2008; and “Every Farm a Factory”, Food and Power Lecture, 5 March 2008. See also Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory.
Hahamovitch, 36.
John Steinbeck, “Starvation Under the Orange Trees”; Sackman, 267-277.
Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939), 3.
Ibid., 249.
Cletus Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers 1870-1941 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), 71.
On the use of different groups of immigrants in different periods and for different crops, see David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). On the construction of the United States as a racialized nation, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Ngai, 4.
Ibid., 128, 129.
Hahamovitch, 81.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid., 13.
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Thomas Gale, 2006). See especially Section II and Chapter 9 for a discussion of industrial organic agriculture.