Complexity and Statistics

Historiography

Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture

Deborah Fitzgerald, 2003

This is another book in the Yale Agrarian Studies series, in which my book, Peppermint Kings, was published. Deborah Fitzgerald’s argument was that “although individual technologies, particular pieces of legislation, new sorts of expertise, and the availability or disappearance of credit opportunities are all key to understanding what happened in twentieth-century agriculture, it is essential to grasp the overarching logic of change that was taking place in bits and pieces and the industrial system that was being constructed across the country.” This modernization was oriented toward improving “efficiency” to the ideal point when “rational management techniques” took over farm life. “Every Farm a Factory” comes from an International Harvester advertisement, which illustrates the tremendous pressure on both sides of the family farm throughout the twentieth century, as both agricultural markets and agricultural inputs became dominated by fewer, larger businesses. A combine was a huge investment, so the story of credit flows and the control that went with them, is key to understanding this change. It was not just the farmers who were influenced by industrial logic. It was their suppliers, their customers, and increasingly, the creditors (when they were third parties and not those same suppliers and customers), who the farmer had empowered by way of the collateral they held in the farm and its continuing production.

One of the issues noted by “Country Life” interviewers, Fitzgerald said, was that “As land values increased farm size increased as well”. Partly, this change must be attributed to an “understanding” of economies of scale on the part of both equipment manufacturers and farmers (cf Charles Postel). It was not inevitable that harvesters and combines needed to be built that would be so big and expensive that it made no sense to run one on less than a full section of land. It was not inevitable that individual farmers would buy these, rather than groups of neighbors, local associations, coops, or harvest contractors. But it may have seemed inevitable to Progressives steeped in this “logic,” and especially to International Harvester marketing people and boosters of rural prosperity.

Fitzgerald began Chapter 2 with a quote from George Warren (I assume this was George F. Warren, the author of Farm Management), who said “Statistics are very much better than opinions.” This resonated for me when I read it, since I was thinking a lot about the uses of data and anecdote in history. Facts and stories. The assumption buried in Warren’s claim, of course, was that his statistics were based on something other than opinions. The binary nature of the types of questions that lead to statistics can hide the fact that many of these “yes/no” choices exist within a wider range of possibility that the question simply ignores. Even prices (the ultimate “hard data”) can be understood as momentary still points in a turning world of dancing exogenous variables -- so maybe we should think twice about building too much certainty on statistics. But I can agree with Fitzgerald that a belief that the complex, analog multivariance of a living system like agriculture could be reduced to “the numbers,” was a strong motivator. It might also explain why actual farmers looked at scientific Progressives with ongoing skepticism, and continued to resist “book farming” prescriptions by well-meaning Country Life reformers.