American Agriculture From Farm Families to Agribusiness
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AMERICAN AGRICULTURE
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From Farm Families to Agribusiness
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Mark V. Wetherington
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group,
Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
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publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a
review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN: 978-1-4422-6927-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-4422-6928-6 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
For Glenna Pfeiffer
Indiana barn: a symbol of disappearing small family farm agriculture. Painting by
Glenna Pfeiffer, copyright 2019.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Beginnings
Chapter Two: Crop Regions
Chapter Three: Market Revolutions
Chapter Four: Civil War and Reconstructions
Chapter Five: Home on the Range?
Chapter Six: Two World Wars and the Great Depression
Chapter Seven: Get Big or Get Out
Chapter Eight: The Future: What Kind of Agriculture Do You Want?
Sources
Acknowledgments
I USED TO WALK AROUND the small hometown where I grew up
mostly unaware of farmers. Strange, for without the countryside’s
farmers the town would have been empty of the grocers, feed and
seed, mule and tractor dealers, and bankers and doctors whose jobs
depended on providing goods and services to farm families. Today,
almost all those buildings are either empty or gone. So are most of
the farmers. A buzzword in high government places calls for a plan
for the economic redevelopment of rural America and small towns. I
think they are two or three generations too late, but I wish them the
best of luck.
This book is dedicated to Glenna Pfeiffer. It was with her
encouragement and support that I took on the project and I would
not have completed it without her. She has been beside me all the
way raising questions, pointing out sources, and keeping the faith.
One of our first research stops was the Cummer Museum of Art
and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, to look at images of plants and
American Indian agriculture. There we found the papers of Ninah
Holden Cummer, an avid gardener and the museum’s benefactor.
Her husband’s family, Michigan lumber manufacturers, moved south
for the final assault on northern Florida’s longleaf pine forest. At one
time the Cummer Lumber Company was Florida’s largest landowner.
Unlike so many of their fellow timbermen who followed the cut out
and get out philosophy, the Cummers stayed in Florida and left a
legacy to the city—the Cummer Art Museum and Gardens.
In Ninah Cummer’s papers are words to the effect that trees are
plants too. As I researched and thought about this book that
sentiment came back to me more than once. In addition to the wild
grasses, flowers, and plants she loved, ironically longleaf pines, the
source of Cummer’s wealth, were rarely, if ever, mentioned in her
papers. But trees are the first casualties of agriculture, and after
trees the natural grasses beneath them.
A project like this depends on many people—friends, archivists,
librarians—and I thank them all: John David Smith, University of
North Carolina, Charlotte, and Series Editor, for contacting me about
this project; Lynn Norris and Holly Keris, Cummer Museum of Art
and Gardens; Patrick Haughey, Savannah College of Art and
Design; the Georgia Archives and the National Archives at Atlanta;
Martha Lundgren, Bellarmine University W. L. Lyons Brown Library;
Jacksonville Historical Society; Coastal Georgia Historical Society;
Epworth by the Sea Arthur Moore Methodist Museum’s library staff;
Brunswick-Glynn County Library, Brunswick, Georgia; Johna Ebling,
independent museum and archives consultant; Jon Sisk and the
Rowman & Littlefield editorial department. I also thank James J.
Holmberg, curator of collections, Filson Historical Society, for his
friendship and support, and to the historical society’s staff, especially
Jennifer Cole and Heather Potter. Last but certainly not least, I thank
my teachers.
Introduction
AMERICAN AGRICULTURE IS THE STORY of farming in the United
States from its Amerindian origins to the present. Today, a system
that encourages large industrial farms to overproduce subsidized
commodity crops has put small family farms in a difficult situation.
This book traces the history of agriculture in the United States by
providing a narrative overview of significant historical trends explored
through specific crop regions and their emergence over time.
American Agriculture takes an interdisciplinary approach and
places the major themes—control, consolidation, and chemical
farming—within the broader context of the nation’s history. These
themes, or the “three Cs,” carry us through centuries of agriculture
from American Indian farming to “Big Farm” America today. Below
are a few words about the three Cs and their connection to
agricultural production, processing, and distribution. When thinking
about control, for example, consider the control of agricultural
resources including capital, land, labor, animals and machines,
seeds and fertilizer, pesticides, and daily farm decisions.
Consolidation involves bringing together farms and the resources
that make farm production from seed to shelf more stable and longer
lasting. Some farming institutions have exercised enough control and
consolidation to weather the ups and downs of natural disasters,
market fluctuations, and takeover attempts. Agribusiness companies
are prime examples of consolidation and vertical integration.
Chemical farming is possible due to control and consolidation of
science, technology, and engineering resources to produce and
manipulate synthetic fertilizers, seeds, and pesticides through
genetic engineering. The central question is: How did we get where
we are today?
Control, consolidation, and chemicals created environments
characterized by violence and exploitation. Control of land, for
example, required dispossession of Native peoples and possession
of their farmland by Euro-Americans. By 1840, almost all Indians
were west of the Mississippi River. The growth and consolidation of
cash crop cultures such as cotton and tobacco created the need for
more labor and resulted in the importation of enslaved Africans and
eventually led to a sharecropping and tenant farming system that
included whites as well. The rise of large-scale industrial farms after
the 1970s witnessed the decline of small-scale family farming and so
did an expensive NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium found
in fertilizers) chemical farming system that led to environmental
degradation in terms of polluted air and water, deforestation, toxic
soils, and violence toward people, particularly those of color and the
poor, across time and landscapes. The results have included
imbalances of economic, political, and social power, racism, and
class conflict.
The following chapters are grouped together to cover hundreds of
years of agriculture. Chapters 1 and 2 describe how gender control
of agriculture changed and how cash crops encouraged farm
consolidation and the growth of slavery. Chapter 3 carries us through
a market revolution that transformed the North, giving it an
infrastructure of railroads, canals, cities, and factories and a growing
population to win the war.
Chapters 4 and 5 treat the pivotal Civil War and Reconstruction
eras and their consequences: the victorious North and the
Republican Party in economic, political, and social control; the
defeated and impoverished South mired in the crop lien system that
included freed people and landless white farmers. The postwar
expansion of transportation and communications systems brought
the remote eastern farmer and livestock landscapes into the national
market mainstream and consolidated the North’s economic power by
1900.
Chapters 6 and 7 describe the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries when control and consolidation of agriculture led to
chemical farming, which benefited from scientific and technological
advances—synthetic fertilizers, mechanization, GMOs (genetically
modified organisms), and hormones—during both world wars. This
was especially true of nitrogen fixation, the NPK model, and the
“Green Revolution.” Farm consolidation is accompanied by greater
specialization in commodity crops such as corn and soybeans on
large industrial farms.
Chapter 8 deals with present and future farming issues, many of
which are unresolved. “Getting Big” had been the agricultural mantra
since the 1970s, but did it pay off for the average US farmer? By the
1980s, the “farm crisis” left thousands of overinvested commodity
farmers in debt and bankrupt. NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement) was in part a reaction to the crisis, but has it worked for
farmers who do not benefit from the trading scheme? One thing is
clear. Critics of present-day Big Farm America agree that something
is wrong using words and phrases such as “scandalous” and “this
ain’t normal” to describe the industrial farming world where farmers
received a much smaller portion of the dollar in the marketplace than
at the beginnings of the post–World War II era.
In 1900, almost 40 percent of the US population still lived on
farms. Today, that number is less than 2 percent. Millions of farmers
left the land in the twentieth century largely by federal design but not
by choice. Between World War II and the 1980s the average farm
size increased to 450 acres as small farms worked by tenants,
sharecroppers, and independent owners were consolidated into
larger holdings. During the 1970s, an emphasis on expanding farm
size and increasing commodity crop production was and continues to
be subsidized by billions of dollars to plant GMO seeds sprayed with
synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. As much as 85 percent of this
taxpayer-funded largesse goes to the largest commodity farmers,
most of them in the corn and wheat belts of the Midwest. This was
no accident. It is the result of a strategy to sweep off less “efficient”
farmers who did not have the resources to grow their acreage,
mechanization, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and hybrid seeds
and replace them with fewer but larger members of a Big Farm
America. The creation of this landscape is the result of federal farm
programs, the farm lobby, manufacturers and distributors of farm
machinery, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, GMO products, major
food producers, processors, distributors, and farm country’s
representatives at the state and national levels. Despite impressive
gains in agricultural outputs, especially in grains such as corn and
wheat, the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture)
estimated in 2019 that forty million US citizens (about 12 percent)
lived in food-insecure households after seventy-five years of farm bill
subsidies.
Why do farmers farm? That’s a good question given their shrinking
presence in American society and in the workforce—less than 3
percent today. It is certainly not the easiest way to make a living or
find certainty in what tomorrow will bring. Nature alone can unravel
the best-laid farm plan with drought, insect infestation, crop failure,
and loss of livestock. It is hard work filled with lots of stress. The
suicide rate for farmers is double that of veterans. That stress only
increases with mounting debt, mortgage deadlines, and declining
crop prices. Many Midwest farmers were hopeful that the years after
2016 would be a good. The region is one of mostly red states and
helped put President Trump in the White House. It proved to be a
good year for soybeans. That summer, because of the president’s
trade war tariffs, soybean prices dropped about 18 percent and pork
and corn about 15 percent. The cost of farming has not gone down.
Rumors of soybean fallout impacting midterm House district
elections proved true in the 2018 midterm election.
Kentucky farmer, writer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry
believes farmers farm because “they must do it for love.” They love
to watch plants and animals grow, to work outdoors with their family
on land they own, to gain a sense of independence and place, and
live “at least part of their lives without a boss.” Good farmers, Berry
writes, are “stewards of Creation.” They conserve soil and water,
preserve natural wildlife and scenery. For Berry, “every man is called
to be an artist,” and small family farms are among the last places to
do it. His method of farming harkens back to the pre–World War II
traditional agricultural path where farmers worked their own land with
their own hands, often with animal power. It was and is today low-
input farming. This style of farming has been called “safety-first”
farming in that its main goal is to raise enough food to feed the farm
family and risk only a small surplus of land and labor on commercial
crops. Any surplus is taken to local markets thus keeping the crops’
carbon footprint to a minimum.
Since World War II the traditional path has been displaced by
commercial or industrial farming with its high inputs of hybrid seeds,
pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, and mechanization. The result is
agriculture as industry and big business. The result is an ever-
increasing emphasis on efficiency at the cost of human involvement,
not only in the past with the removal of millions of Americans from
agriculture, but from American Indian farming to the present and into
the future. With the growing power and control made possible by
technology, including precision farming and robotic driverless
tractors that are well into the development stage, is it worth asking
how long meaningful human involvement will continue? Especially
the spirit of the farmer as artist, invoked by writers such as Wendell
Berry as well as others who are drawn to farming out of love of land,
nature, and a call to stewardship.
1
Beginnings
THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE
The when and where of agriculture in the United States is difficult to
determine. Thousands of years before Europeans made landfall
American Indians had solved many of the mysteries of food plant
domestication. Scholars agree that there is no one widely accepted
answer to this question. Archaeologists T. Douglas Price and Ofer
Bar-Yosef write, “there is as yet no single accepted theory for the
origins of agriculture—rather, there is a series of ideas and
suggestions that do not quite resolve the question.”
The Zapotec Indians of southern Mexico domesticated corn more
than seven thousand years ago in a region believed to be one of the
centers of the “origin of corn.” Almost four thousand years ago
varieties of small ears of corn were planted in present-day New
Mexico. These early farmers also understood the nutritional and
medicinal values of many wild plants. However, major questions
remain unanswered regarding early agriculture. A wide range of
specialists worldwide, including archaeologists, anthropologists,
archaeobotanists, botonists, and zooarchaelogists, continue to
search for clues to the beginnings of agriculture.
AMERICAN INDIAN AGRICULTURE
Why did hunter-gatherers shift to farming? Was it due to climate
change or population pressure? How long did it take Amerindians to
give up hunting game and begin to collect berries, nuts, and roots as
food sources? There are no conclusive answers to these questions.
This hunting and gathering culture developed more than one
hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years ago. Based on a
study of hunter-gatherers, small groups carried on nomadic lives
hunting and gathering, with the men leaving the group to hunt while
the women and children gathered small animals, plants, and fruit and
nuts. Women created pots and baskets needed to move food from
one place to another, but there was little or no planting being done.
The social structure was simple and there was virtually no hierarchy.
About twenty thousand years before the appearance of agriculture,
hand axes and tools were created from stones, animal bones, and
antlers. Prior to about seventeen thousand years ago people had
made cord and small ropes from natural fibers (grasses, tree bark)
for traps and nets. In areas unsuited for agriculture, because of poor
soil or marginal rainfall, hunting and gathering continued as a way of
life.
Where did agriculture in the United States begin? Did early
peoples depend on outside sources that later reached the North
American continent, or did they develop their own agricultural
resources? Was it some combination of both internal and external
origins? Scholars agree that there are as many as eight to ten sites
worldwide where plant domestication independently occurred. Five
are in the Western Hemisphere and one in the United States. For
much of the twentieth century the prevailing idea was that agriculture
reached the present-day United States from South America, Mexico,
and Asia as a part of a migration of external culture groups. By
around 6000 BCE farmers in the highlands of Mexico were
cultivating plants in gardens for food and medicine, including maize,
peppers, squash, gourds, cotton, and peanuts, among others. In
Peru, farmers based their food supply around potatoes, eventually
growing up to thirty different crops, but they were slower to discover
grains and animals for purposes of domestication.
Throughout the 1990s, the location of the North American region
of plant domestication was debated. Based on seeds found in rock
shelters in the woodlands of Kentucky and Appalachia, archaeologist
and researcher Bruce D. Smith contends that plant domestication
developed independently in the eastern region of North America
around 5000 cal BP. While this is much later than the emergence of
corn in Mexico (9000 cal BP) and domesticated plants in South
America (10000 cal BP), some contend that plant domestication at
sites in the Western Hemisphere took place at the same time.
Altogether, Native peoples domesticated around one hundred plants,
though there were no wild grains as we know them. It is important to
understand that new discoveries will be made that will answer old
questions and that will raise new ones, but the general trend in
research and scholarship is to extend the presence of Amerindians
and the dawn of agriculture farther into the past than previously
accepted.
We know that agriculture did not occur overnight or evenly across
time, and that many Indian groups continued to supplement their
diets with wild game and plants long after farming became a part of
their culture. The dawn of agriculture has been pushed back ten
thousand years and perhaps earlier. Before ten thousand years ago
almost everyone ate food from the wild; by two thousand years ago
many people depended upon farming for some of their food supply.
A so-called agricultural revolution had taken place. Climatic warming
contributed to the appearance of agriculture at different places
around the globe at about the same time. Still, the appearance of
agriculture was shaped locally by landscape, climate, and
biodiversity as well as by population growth and the decline of wild
plants and animals as food sources due to overconsumption. Social
structures that had been in place for thousands of years were
gradually rearranged around more permanent settlements when
