Agriculture and History

A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929

Paul K. Conkin, 2008

Paul Conkin was 80 when he published this book. He included his own memories and the farming experiences of members of his family, with a history drawn from statistics and other primary and secondary sources. This was interesting, despite a boosterish perspective and a sense of the inevitability of agribusiness with which I disagree. Conkin spent most of his career doing intellectual history, focusing on utopian movements. Arthur Schlesinger praised Conkin’s 1959 book about the New Deal, Tomorrow a New World, despite what he called its “certain woodenness of style and a consequent failure always to convey the human dimension of the communitarian experiments.” The personal reflections and recollections in this book provide a good balance for what might otherwise be a dry, slightly pedantic history of farming.

One of the points Conkin stressed was that the popular notion that agriculture has “declined” in America depends on your point of view. Conkin, of course, was the reviewer who ripped Danbom’s book The Resisted Revolution for saying (in his understanding of Danbom) that the Progressives were urban idealists who despised farmers. Conkin claimed, “agriculture has been the most successful sector in the recent economic history of the United States.” Technology, but also markets, economic changes and government policy decisions, “reduced the number of farm operators needed to produce 89 percent of our agricultural output from around 6 million in the 1930s to less than 350,000 today.” These increases in efficiency allowed over five and a half million people to go do something else, which Conkin apparently considered success.

Conkin began by addressing the origin of commercial farming in America. While farmers supplied many of their own needs, he said, “from the [they] beginning depended on markets.” As recently as 1800, Conkin said, “it took more than 50 percent of human labor worldwide to procure food.” It now takes only a few percent. This change was clearly beneficial in that it freed people up to do other things, but Conkin never really assessed the cost of these changes in terms of either the resources that enabled them or the social changes that went with them. In both cases, what happened is treated as somehow inevitable and resistance to it (both by populists and by contemporary advocates of sustainability) was portrayed as backward-looking and wrongheaded.

This is ironic, because Conkin was aware that farm work was quite different from industrial or even white-collar labor. He remembered “the pace of farmwork to be leisurely, with rest periods, long lunch breaks, and the slow handling of more routine tasks.” At harvest time, work was more strenuous and prolonged -- one of the important points Conkin made in his reminiscences was that as new technology was introduced, its adoption took time. While larger farms might have jumped right in (“By 1860,” he said, reapers were at work on a minority of farms (60,000).”), many smaller farms continued using old tools and horse power well into the twentieth century. Resistance to new technology might also have helped some smaller operators avoid the logic of expansion: if you didn’t buy the combine that only makes economic sense on a farm of 1000+ acres, you might be able to continue to make ends meet on 160.

Conkin portrayed Calvin Coolidge as an enemy of export bounties and Herbert Hoover as a farm supporter who passed the 1929 Agricultural Marketing Act, “by far the most ambitious farm legislation to date.” Conkin credited new deal farm policy largely to Hoover, which is an interesting, counterintuitive argument that may merit a closer look sometime.

Farm life in 1930, Conkin said, “was closer to that of 1830 than 1960,” and he described some of the details from his own experience. These passages might be especially valuable to students with no farm experience of their own (or for future classroom use). Conkin’s approach to the economics is shown in these passages to originate in seeing farmers begin “to buy more food in town and grow less on the farm. For those who did not sell milk,” he said, “it was soon uneconomical to keep a cow.” It’s hard for me to believe this could really have been the main reason for this change. He continued, “After World War II, the efficiency of production in almost every specialized area of agriculture and the efficiencies in the processing and marketing of foods made it cheaper to buy almost any type of food than to grow one’s own.” The fact that this change was enabled by a rapid increase in industrial inputs from off the farm (oil, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery) was not apparent from Conkin’s description, just as it may not have been to other people who experienced the change. Nor does Conkin really explain why (or even whether) farm people were so ready to embrace their new roles as high-volume producers of monoculture and give up on an earlier ideal of self-sufficiency.

Conkin also described the transition of his farm community to a rural suburb.  Because his home was seventeen miles from three industrial centers, Conkin witnessed “the gradual development of a single labor market embracing both urban and rural areas, accompanied by a complex array of lifestyle choices.” And his family experience reinforced the idea that increasingly expensive equipment costs created a “mandate to grow or die” and to specialize in corn and soybeans. But Conkin did not examine any alternatives to individual ownership of all this equipment, despite his expertise in historical communitarian movements. A large section of the book described government farm policies from the new deal to the present, without shedding too much light on the subject.

In 2002, Conkin said, “2,902 dairy farms had more than 500 cows, and almost all had annual sales of more than $1 million. The average herd size for farms with more than $1 million in sales was 1,500 cows. In total, these farms accounted for more than 45 percent of all milk cows in the United States.” This trend towards concentration, he said, was still happening in almost all areas of farming. Labor efficiency had also increased dramatically due to technology. In 1900, Conkin said, “it took 147 hours of human labor to grow 100 bushels of wheat. By 1950 this had shrunk to only 14, and by 1990 to only 6. In 1929 it took 85 hours of work to produce 1,000 pounds of broilers; by 1980 it took less than 1 hour.” Introducing his section on “Critics and Criticisms,” Conkin said, “Everyone has to concede one point: American farmers have achieved a level of efficient food production unprecedented in world history.” His apparent perception that malcontents might wish to disagree seems to animate this section of the book. It didn’t seem to occur to Conkin that as conditions like energy prices, resource depletion (phosphorus), and the risks associated with new techniques (GMOs) continue to change, the rational decision-makers he praised might need to reconsider practices that have become as traditional for modern mono-crop farmers as cradling and crop rotation once were for their ancestors.

Conkin ultimately betrayed a sort of cranky derision of people who didn’t embrace modern, high-tech agriculture. The word “Sustainable...is now so popular, so widely embraced, that it always begs contextual definition,” Conkin said. This was true, but no more so than many of the concepts that support the agribusiness status quo, which Conkin tacitly accepted. Conkin described several of the leaders of alternative movements, like the Rodales and Wendell Berry, without giving much attention to the substance of the sustainability argument or the strength of the movements. Only in his afterword did Conkin break free of the boosterism that had propelled him through the book, to argue that food prices need to rise. Farm products (and government policy) should be more expensive, and “the shift to higher costs should be based in large part on the pricing of as many externalities as possible.” Finally, an admission, albeit tacit, that government had played a role in the development of American agriculture, and perhaps ought to change its focus. “If this seems like a prescription for the types of alternative agriculture described in chapter 8,” Conkin concluded, “so be it.”