A Revolution Down on the Farm

The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929

Paul K. Conkin

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780813138688
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

At a time when food is becoming increasingly scarce in many parts of the world and food prices are skyrocketing, no industry is more important than agriculture. Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century. Fifty years ago, the planet could not have sustained a population of 6.5 billion; now, commercial and industrial agriculture ensure that millions will not die from starvation. Farmers are able to feed an exponentially growing planet because the greatest industrial revolution in history has occurred in agriculture since 1929, with U.S. farmers leading the way. Productivity on American farms has increased tenfold, even as most small farmers and tenants have been forced to find other work. Today, only 300, 000 farms produce approximately ninety percent of the total output, and overproduction, largely subsidized by government programs and policies, has become the hallmark of modern agriculture. A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 charts the profound changes in farming that have occurred during author Paul K. Conkin's lifetime. His personal experiences growing up on a small Tennessee farm complement compelling statistical data as he explores America's vast agricultural transformation and considers its social, political, and economic consequences. He examines the history of American agriculture, showing how New Deal innovations evolved into convoluted commodity programs following World War II. Conkin assesses the skills, new technologies, and government policies that helped transform farming in America and suggests how new legislation might affect farming in decades to come. Although the increased production and mechanization of farming has been an economic success story for Americans, the costs are becoming increasingly apparent. Small farmers are put out of business when they cannot compete with giant, non-diversified corporate farms. Caged chickens and hogs in factory-like facilities or confined dairy cattle require massive amounts of chemicals and hormones ultimately ingested by consumers. Fertilizers, new organic chemicals, manure disposal, and genetically modified seeds have introduced environmental problems that are still being discovered. A Revolution Down on the Farm concludes with an evaluation of farming in the twenty-first century and a distinctive meditation on alternatives to our present large scale, mechanized, subsidized, and fossil fuel and chemically dependent system.

1. American Agriculture
before 1930

From the beginning, English settlers along the Atlantic coast tried to find products that they could sell back in Britain. Many of these products involved the harvest of abundant forests or the purchase of furs from Indians. But very quickly the first colonists in Virginia found an exportable crop that was in great demand in Europe: tobacco. It was the first commodity, or money crop, for the new colony. It set a pattern. American agriculture from the beginning depended on markets. It was commercial.

COMMERCIAL ORIGINS

Despite their commercial endeavors, most of what these early American farmers grew supplied local needs. Some refer to this as subsistence agriculture, but the label is misleading if it suggests that farmers, even in those first decades in America, supplied all their needs. They bought or traded for many items, including tools, housewares, exotic foods, and even some clothing and furniture. Native Americans had long exchanged agricultural goods for manufactured items, some procured from a considerable distance.

English colonists in North America simply adopted the same farming methods they knew from back home. They used the same draft animals and the same types of hoes and plows, and they planted the seeds they had brought with them to the New World. At first, they took advantage of the open land already cleared by the natives. Soon they added new land by clearing forests. They learned a few tricks from their Indian neighbors and adopted Indian maize as the dominant cereal—more important than wheat, oats, barley, or rye in most regions of America. Unlike in Europe, land was plentiful, although it took hard work to get forestland ready for cultivation. Rents were low to nonexistent. It was labor that was expensive. Thus, American farmers sought laborsaving innovations, not the means to extract more production from each acre of land. In a sense, they were reckless in their clearing of trees and in risking both soil erosion and soil exhaustion. Like the Native Americans before them, they simply moved their crops to new ground when yields on older fields declined.

Unlike the Indians, the English settlers adopted a fee-simple type of tenure, not an open commons. Up through the nineteenth century, most American farms had more land than any one family could cultivate, even with many working children or one or two expensive hired hands. Only in the South, with its tobacco, coastal rice, and cotton crops, did Americans acquire a servile labor force that allowed the cultivation of large plantations—a pattern Europeans had earlier adopted in the Caribbean.

Through the early nineteenth century, Americans could best compete in world markets by selling farm and forest products as they grew or cut them at the first level of processing (such as ginned cotton, flour, or lumber). Quite simply, they were able to produce such goods at the lowest possible prices. This involved not only a surplus of good land but also acquired skills and, gradually, the development of new and better tools. Americans exchanged such agricultural goods for more refined European manufactured products (furniture, fancy clothing, clocks) that, given the labor constraints, they could not produce at a competitive cost at home. This gradually changed after 1815, particularly in New England, as good land became scarce, labor supplies increased (young women were the first source, then immigrants), and new forms of manufacturing developed. Textiles led the way, as they still do in much of the world. They became the first major industry to adapt to a factory type of mass production.

In 1800 it took more than 50 percent of human labor worldwide to procure food. This was true even in England, despite its strong commitment to manufacturing. In the United States, one can only estimate the amount of labor devoted to agriculture. At least 90 percent of the population had some tie to agriculture, even if only part time. City artisans grew gardens and, if possible, owned cows, hogs, chickens, or all three. Lawyers, ministers, and schoolteachers almost uniformly owned farmland and at least supervised farming operations. At that time, given the level of agricultural technology, one farm family could supply food for only one other family on average. Also, farmers devoted much U.S. cropland to nonfood crops—mainly tobacco before 1800, but within two decades, even more so to cotton. But very slowly, with each passing decade, farming became more efficient.¹ By 1870, one able farmer growing wheat or corn could feed three other families. By 1900, one farmer might feed five other families; by 1930, almost ten. In 1900 agriculture was still, by far, the largest economic sector, with 40 percent of 76 million Americans living on farms. At least another 10 percent of workers were involved in agricultural services.

As a percentage of the total population, farmers declined year by year. The only possible exception was 1933 and 1934, when the normal pattern of migration to cities reversed, and the rural population increased. Meanwhile, the total number of farmers grew very slowly until the mid-1930s and then began a slow decline. In 1940 the farm population fell to what it had been in 1900—about 30 million (today it is around 4.5 million, but a majority of these people are only marginally involved in agriculture). The amount of cultivated land on farms increased until about 1935; since then, it has very slowly declined. But even in 1930 the largest segment of the labor force remained in agriculture—around 25 percent. By 1940, the agricultural revolution had begun in earnest, and the number of farmers and (less rapidly) the number of farms dropped precipitously with each decade until 1980. Both numbers have changed only marginally since then. However, the number of full-time farmers and the number of farms that contribute significantly to agricultural production (320,000 farms accounted for 89 percent of the total production in 2002) have continued to decline.²

The steady but slow growth of agricultural productivity before the Great Depression reflected several important innovations but could not conceal many deeply rooted maladies. The most important problem was the economic plight of the South in the post—Civil War years. Another was the growth of farm tenancy, which does not necessarily cause lower productivity but was in fact a major drag on production in the South. Another problem was the heritage of reckless exploitation of the land, with much of the South plagued by soil erosion and the overfarmed areas of the Great Plains subject to the terrible dust storms of the mid-1930s. In many places, overcropping had also depleted soil nutrients, a problem only partly solved by 1940 with the increasing use of chemical fertilizers. Another problem was price instability, with cycles of boom and bust leading to credit crises. Progress in farming increasingly depended on credit and thus the maintenance of debt as an operating cost.

Finally, as a whole, farmers were not very efficient. Almost everyone who writes about farm life stresses the hard work, even the drudgery. Farmers have helped nourish this image, often to their political benefit. But economists know better. Several farm tasks, particularly preparing the land for crops, planting, and harvesting, required long hours of work by several people, but only for short periods. Larger farms often had hired hands to meet these peak labor demands, but they had to board and pay these employees year-round. Clearly, farmers had to work more days out of the year than did city workers. Almost all farms before 1930 had horses to care for and feed twice a day. Most had milk cows, hogs, and chickens, meaning chores every day of the year. In this sense, the work was unrelenting, although it might take only a couple of hours each day. But aside from the peak periods, labor was usually redundant on farms. This meant that farmers often looked for outside work in the winter months, and southerners often rented out the labor of their slaves. Of course, farmers could find things to do on the farm in the winter or after the crops were laid by in the summer, but my observation is that they took plenty of time off for hunting and fishing or simply loafing at the country store. Also, apart from the intensity of labor during the harvest (or the threshing of wheat), I found the pace of farmwork to be leisurely, with rest periods, long lunch breaks, and the slow handling of more routine tasks. The amount of annual work performed by women easily exceeded that of men—child care, cooking, milking, churning butter, washing, ironing, sewing, tending a vegetable garden, and canning an endless array of foods for the winter. The cure for most of these problems lay ahead and would account for the takeoff in productivity after the mid-1930s—the main themes in subsequent chapters of this book.

In 1930, the average farm was not all that different from one in the late nineteenth century. Despite the increasing use of tractors, most farms still used horses and mules—about 25 million of them that year (down only 5 million from the peak in the early 1920s). By 1930, horse-based technology had reached its maximum development, and in some cases this was quite an intricate technology. Although farmers had increased their specialization, in the sense that most of them grew only one or two money crops, almost everyone had to grow corn (for human food as well as for livestock). Food for home use still came largely from the farm, as did the all-important fuel needed for cooking and heating. Gradual improvements in agricultural productivity before 1930 involved two factors: reduced labor for each acre cultivated, and improved yields per acre. The most dramatic improvements before 1930 were in labor requirements.

TILLING AND PREPARING THE SOIL

Historically, the most basic agricultural tool was the plow. Before plows, the ground had to be prepared by sticks, hoes, or spades. The predecessors of modern plows go back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The curved trunk of a small tree made up the beam, pulled by oxen, and either a sharp curve in the beam or a second strip of wood tied to the beam was sharpened at the end and used to make a furrow in the ground. Handles were also attached to this crude plow. Of course, the wood point quickly became worn and dull, so the Egyptians made a hard cover from flint. By biblical times, iron was used for what we now call the share. In some light soils, furrowing plows work fairly well, but not in tight soils or in sod. The modern equivalent of these first plows was what we called, in my youth, the single-foot plow, which we used to create rows in the garden and in tobacco fields. The Romans added larger points or shares, as well as a flat board along one side of the share to force the disturbed soil to move in one direction. This was the origin of what became the moldboard and a true turning plow, one that flipped the sod over in such a way as to loosen the disturbed dirt.³

By 1700, the English had devised dozens of plow designs, most of which involved wooden moldboards that forced some turning of the soil, but these were usually sloped or only slightly curved. They were hard to pull and left the sod vertical to the ground, not fully flipped. The first moldboard with the double curve of a modern plow was perfected in England in 1730, and this type of plow sold well. Almost all plows used in America before 1800 had wooden beams and moldboards and cast-iron shares, which dulled quickly. But after the American Revolution, new designs appeared almost every year. Thomas Jefferson invented a new moldboard (curved, but still too flat) and proposed to replace his wooden model with one made of cast iron. The first American patent for a cast-iron moldboard was issued in 1800. By 1814, American inventors filed patents for plows with cast-iron beams and moldboards. These had curved moldboards close to those of modern plows, and most had a colter attached to the beam, in front of the moldboard, to cut through the sod. By then, several inventors had found ways to bolt the plowshare—the cutting edge—to the moldboard, allowing farmers to replace a broken or worn share quickly, but the intractable problem was finding a moldboard and share that easily scoured (shed the dirt). In 1837 a blacksmith, John Deere, became famous when he replaced cast-iron shares with ones made of steel, which was still quite expensive. Steel shares provided the polished, dirt-shedding surface needed to turn the deep virgin soils of the Midwest. When steel became cheaper, he and others added steel moldboards and, after the Civil War, even steel beams.

In most soils, the single plow required two horses. On small farms, the two-horse plow remained dominant until 1930, or when horses began to give way to tractors. On larger farms, beginning as early as 1864, the standard plow became a riding plow with two wheels and a seat, often called a sulky (after harness racing). Four horses pulled it. At first it had only one moldboard, but inventors soon added a second. By World War I, an increasing number of farmers in the West, Great Plains, and Midwest did their plowing with heavy tractors that could pull four or more bottoms, which they called gang plows.

Except in the most friable soil, plowing did not leave the soil ready for the planting of seeds. Further preparation required leveling and breaking up clods—a process called harrowing. This was not a complex task. Some farmers used a simple tool called a drag—boards nailed to a frame and pulled over the soil, with stones or even children added to weigh it down. Later, heavy rollers did the same work. Even in Roman times, farmers used brush from trees to drag over the soil. The Romans also used wooden pegs attached to a wooden frame to pulverize soil, or the first true harrow. By 1800, farmers had developed dozens of different designs and shapes for harrows and had replaced wooden teeth with iron spikes. When I was a boy, the favorite local design was a double Aframe, with iron teeth. By then, more sophisticated harrows had spring teeth that could better hug the ground. However, no toothed harrow was as efficient as the disk harrow, which was perfected just after the Civil War. These implements had revolving concave disks that rolled through the soil at an angle determined by the operator (the greater the angle, the more the disks dug into the soil). Later, large disks pulled by tractors could cut so deeply into soil as to become substitutes for turning plows. Such disks are still used today, although they are not as effective as revolving tines (called rotary hoes or, for gardens, rototillers).

TOOLS FOR PLANTING AND CULTIVATING

Seed planting followed soil preparation. From ancient times, farmers did this by hand. They broadcast seeds of wheat and other small grains by hand and dropped the seeds for row crops into hills or prepared rows. The challenge was to find machines that did these jobs better and faster. For most of the grasses used for hay, the goal was a mechanical broadcaster. The earliest answer was a hand-held and hand-cranked hurricane spreader (I still own and use one of these). Later, farmers attached rotary spreaders to the backs of wagons, with power supplied by a wagon wheel. For the spreading of fertilizer and lime on pastures, large hurricane-type spreaders, operated by a tractor or on the back of a truck, are still the preferred tools. Broadcasting worked best for seeds that did not require a covering of soil to germinate. When used for small grain, one had to use a harrow or brush to cover at least most of the seeds, to protect them from birds and to ensure enough moisture for germination.

What was needed was a drill. It took more than two hundred years and hundreds of experimental designs to perfect a single-row drill or planter for row crops, and multiple drills, placed side by side at about eight-inch intervals, for small grains. In each case, the challenges included making a device to feed seeds from a hopper at the proper rate into a funnel or tube leading to the ground, a device to open a small furrow at the desired depth as a receptacle for the seeds, and a device to cover the seeds with soil. In addition, in a grain drill, with its width and multiple feeds (about eight in early drills; twenty or more in those pulled by tractors), the feet that work at the ground level have to be flexible enough to maintain contact and the correct depth over uneven ground. This requires either springs on each tube or a hydraulic device (like a shock absorber on an automobile) to compensate for uneven surfaces and to spring back from rock or roots. Drills that met some of these requirements were in use by 1840, but it was only after the Civil War that drills meeting all these requirements were available at a price farmers could afford. Later drills, like most contemporary ones, had double disks on each head to open space for the seeds. By 1900, drills usually had three bins—one for the grain, another for fertilizer, and one for grass seed that was often planted with wheat. By 1930, on moderate-sized, pretractor farms, the drill was usually the most complex farm implement except for the binder for small grains.

For row crops, the early drills or planters used a single wheel to provide the power. In time, almost all such planters would have revolving disks with holes that captured the seeds and dropped them when the hole passed over the funnel or top of the tunnel. Various hole sizes and various intervals between holes fit different crops and allowed different spacing. By the Civil War, most large farms used two-row planters for corn, with two wheels and a seat for the driver. In the Midwest, as part of a weed control strategy, the two plates were synchronized (check-row planters), so that the seeds (usually three or four) could drop at roughly three-foot intervals, creating a checkerboard pattern. This meant that a cultivator could plow in two directions, almost eliminating the need for hoeing.

For some crops (tobacco, sweet potatoes, tomatoes), the most laborintensive task was the transplanting of seedlings. Either the seeds had to be started indoors early, before the end of spring frosts, or the tiny seeds did not lend themselves to field conditions. At the appropriate time, the tender plants had to be transplanted in the fields, which was backbreaking work. Only after...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. American Agriculture before 1930
• 2. The Traditional Family Farm: A Personal Account
• 3. A New Deal for Agriculture, 1930-1938
• 4. World War II and Its Aftermath: A Family Report
• 5. Dimensions of an Agricultural Revolution
• 6. Surpluses and Payments: Federal Agricultural Policy, 1954-2008
• 7. Farming in the Twenty-first Century: Status and Challenges
• 8. Alternatives
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index