FARMING IN THE U.S.A

Farming is at the same time a vocation, a necessity, and an industry. It provides the essentials for life but can also function like any other business using capital investment, technology, political lobbying, and marketing strategies to maximize profit. Until the last part of the 20th century, subsistence farming and production for market have always existed simultaneously in the United States. Thus, a survey of American farming does not offer a simple trend toward capitalistic agriculture. Instead it presents a complex interaction between the need for food and the desire for profit, influenced at all times by cultural and political realities, scientific and technical change, and the potentials and limitations of the natural environment.
Most of the early colonists of North America came to improve their financial situation. They were in search of a way to make money, and, for many, agriculture proved the answer. So, from the very beginning of white settlement, both subsistence and capitalist agriculture coexisted. Commercial agriculture was especially strong in the southern colonies, with tobacco, rice, and indigo dominating profit-export crops until the 1793 invention of the cotton gin. The northern and middle colonies also produced crops for export, especially wheat, and farms in these colonies also supplied the growing local and urban markets.
During the 50 or so years from the American Revolution to the 1830s, agriculture in the new United States continued some trends established in the colonial era, while simultaneously undergoing dramatic changes sparked by technological developments and the creation of the public domain.
Most agriculture remained a mix of subsistence and commercial, and as many as 96 percent of the people lived in rural areas. Farms, with the exception of southern plantations, tended to be small (80–120 acres or so), and they generally produced a wide range of crops and livestock, supplying the farm family’s needs as much as possible. Once the needs of subsistence were met, farmers used additional land to produce a surplus to sell or trade at market for goods that they could not grow themselves—for example, iron, salt, and coffee.
On these farms, most of the labor was provided by the farm family. The homeplace was the workplace, and everyone except the very young contributed their labor. The women and children were responsible for the farm garden and the smaller livestock, as well as such food production as brewing, baking, and preserving, while the men farmed the field crops and took care of the stock animals. At harvest time, all hands were needed in the fields, and other chores were postponed until the crops were in.
Although farm labor was gender-differentiated, most labor during this period was unpaid, with the only income generated through barter or sale of produce. Farmers marketed most of their surplus production locally and were limited by the distance they could travel—either by foot or wagon—before their product spoiled. Thus, farmers who had settled on the frontier—over the Appalachian ridge—tended to produce for market only items that were durable, transportable, and had a high value for a small bulk, such as hogs and whiskey, while farmers nearer urban centers produced grain and truck crops.
The main exception to these small-scale farms were the plantations of the slave South. These farms were very large, ranging upward of 500 acres; produced mainly cash crops (although they aimed at self-sufficiency); and operated with slave labor. The farm family on the plantations did not labor manually, but rather both men and women adopted a managerial role. Plantation owners largely produced crops for the export market. Although the market for indigo had ended after the American Revolution removed British subsidies from the crop, the United Kingdom provided a growing market for the South’s new main crop—cotton. Other key staples in the South included tobacco, sugar, rice, and hemp.
These crops were generally sent directly to Europe in the care of factors, who would supervise the sales and then purchase luxuries for the plantation family with the profits. Thus, without much local trade or production, town growth in the American South during this period was slow and politically driven. While the family farm and the plantation had existed in colonial times, the period of the new republic did see some dramatic shifts. One of the most significant decisions for the agricultural future of the United States was the creation of the public domain in 1781, when states that held lands west of the Appalachians ceded them to the confederation government.
This public domain was considerably expanded in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase and again in 1848 in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War. Theoretically, the public domain was intended to benefit all citizens by giving them access to cheap land, something that no longer existed in Europe. Between its creation and the Homestead Act of 1862, the government experimented with various land laws that sold the public domain to citizens relatively inexpensively.

The other main change in this period that had an impact on agricultural development was the improvement of transportation systems. In the early 19th century, the invention of the steamboat and the proliferation of canals in the Northeast revolutionized the movement of both people and products. The steamboat made traveling up rivers such as the Mississippi and the Ohio as easy as traveling down them. Therefore, goods could be hauled to the settled markets of the East from western farms and likewise supplies hauled to frontier farms.
In conjunction with canals, the steamboats made it easier and quicker for families to move west, take advantage of the public domain, and farm the frontier. In 1830, the first railroads were constructed in the United States to haul agricultural produce from hinterlands to urban markets. This development increased the marketing range of farms, allowing them to ship heavier goods farther with little loss of profit.
The middle part of the 19th century was marked by expansion, innovation, and violence, much of which affected agriculture on American farms. Over the course of 50 years, the farm population expanded to meet the food needs of a growing nation. At the same time, as the Industrial Revolution took a firm hand on the country’s economy, farmers believed, somewhat justifiably, that their income and their status were declining. To counter this problem, farmers adopted new techniques and machines to increase production, they appealed to the federal government for help, and they organized themselves into both nonpartisan and political groups to force the changes they saw as necessary for survival.
One of the main characteristics of this period was the continuation of westward expansion. The initial movement leapfrogged the Great Plains, which were seen as infertile, and thousands of people trekked overland to Oregon and California. Here they sold their agricultural surpluses to miners and lumbermen and local urban centers. As the transcontinental railroads were completed, more and more of the farmers of the West were able to tap into the large markets of the East.
Toward the end of the century, after the federal government had confined many of the native plains people on reservations and enacted the Homestead Act (1862), awarding a free 160 acres to anyone willing to improve it, many settlers flocked to the central regions of the country. Because of the distances involved on the Great Plains, these farmers were the first in the nation to be completely dependent on railroads. Largely producing wheat, their markets were in the big midwestern cities—Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Omaha. This dependency on railroads created resentment, as farmers saw their profits fade, while railroad income seemed to remain strong.
Northern farmers during the 19th century became dependent on other technologies, along with railroads. Various innovations such as McCormick’s reaper (1834), the steel plow (1837), and artificial fertilizers (1849) made farming easier and more efficient. Farmers could increase acreage and production with the same amount of labor. However, the farmers did not benefit as much as they hoped. Overproduction and other factors caused crop prices to fall in the 1880s and 1890s. In addition, many farmers assumed debt to purchase new machinery, and these liens could not be repaid with their ever decreasing income. The initial response of many farmers was to produce still more, but this just compounded the problem, and so they searched for other solutions.
In the Reconstruction South, planters faced the problem of no cash and no labor. Meanwhile, freedmen needed work but had limited skills. Sharecropping was initially seen as a solution mutually beneficial to both groups. Land owners would provide a freed family with land, seed, a house, and mules. The family would farm the land and pay the landlord with a share of the crop. This sharecropping system degenerated over time, as white landlords and shopkeepers took advantage of black illiteracy to reduce them to a state of crop peonage. Poor whites, too, were increasingly trapped in sharecropping, losing their land to the massive cotton plantations that dominated the South far more than they ever had before the war.
Faced with marginalization in an increasingly industrialized society and with declining profits, farmers in both North and South started to organize. Starting with the Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, in 1867, farmers came together for socialization, economic well-being through cooperatives, and political leverage. As the century progressed and the farming community did not see economic improvements, these organizations became politicized, culminating with the formation of the People’s Party.

This partisan organization, aimed to free farmers from the oppression of middlemen, first ran a candidate for the presidency in 1892. In the election of 1896, however, the party found its issues subsumed by the major parties, and, although it continued to exist for 20-some more years, it never had any substantial political clout. Along with the creation of independent organizations and political parties, farmers in the second half of the 19th century looked to the federal government to solve their problems.
This started in 1862, with the passage of both the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land Grant Act that established a system whereby every state could have its own school devoted to teaching scientific agriculture and mechanical arts. Farm organizations also looked to government on a state and local level to legislate on their behalf. Thus, the 1870s saw the Granger laws, regulating railroad charges and culminating in the 1887 establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission that regulated railroads on a national level. After the failure of the People’s Party, farmers increasingly saw the federal government and its legislation as their only source of protection and promotion.
The new century began well, with some of the best years ever for American agriculture. However, a combination of overproduction, debt, and drought made the 1920s and 1930s difficult years, and many families abandoned agriculture altogether. The New Deal’s response to the farm crisis altered national farm policy profoundly, making the federal government ultimately responsible for farm income. Despite this, it took World War II to revive the flagging agricultural economy. Farmer protests dried up in the early 20th century as good weather and World War I provided an optimum economic situation for agriculture: high production, high demand, and high prices. The situation was so good, in fact, that the period from 1909 to 1914 was seen as the golden age of farming, when the purchasing power of farmers was equal or better than that of other workers. Until 1976, when “parity” became determined by a complex formula of production costs, farmers strove for parity, or the same purchasing power as in the golden age.
During this boom, farmers moved on to the northern Great Plains, plowing up the land and producing bumper crops on soils previously deemed barren to meet the seemingly endless demand for agricultural produce. On the flat, treeless plains, machinery, either steam or gasoline driven, was particularly useful.
Continued mechanization in the early 20th century reduced the labor needed on farms while increasing the cost of farming. Especially important was the spread of the tractor. These gasoline driven engines were introduced around the turn of the century and quickly replaced steam-driven machinery. Labor shortages engendered by World War I made tractors even more attractive to farmers, but many stuck to horse or mule power, often out of a preference for the animals.
During the 1920s manufacturers developed lighter, cheaper tractors that sped the shift toward mechanical power in agriculture. Mechanization of agriculture, along with developments in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, reduced the need for labor on farms. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, more and more rural people had migrated to towns, and this migration sped up in the 20th century. By the census of 1920 the United States had officially become an urban nation, with more of its population residing in towns and cities than in rural areas.
The 1920s saw a downturn in agricultural prosperity. Foreshadowing the national depression of the 1930s, the decade saw farm prices plummet after the end of the war. Farmers, in debt for their new machinery and new land, found themselves unable to maintain their prosperity, and foreclosures skyrocketed. Once again farm organizations prospered. From the more conservative Farm Bureau (1919) to the radical Non-partisan League (1916), these organizations tried to stop foreclosures and force up farm prices. All of them believed in self-help through cooperation among farmers.
However, they saw the ultimate solution as political: They believed that the government, either on a state or national level, had to regulate costs and prices to ensure that farmers could maintain a reasonable standard of living. Governments, with the exception of that in North Dakota under the Non-partisan League until 1921, did not agree until the onset of the Great Depression.
The Crash of 1929 did not greatly affect the farming population, which generally had little money to invest. What did hurt farmers, especially on the Great Plains, was the drought that started in 1931 and lasted most of the decade, and the complete collapse of food prices. Not able to get back the price of production, farmers left crops to rot in the fields or burned them for fuel, while throughout American cities people suffered starvation.
Government loans, work programs, and credit arrangements helped the nation’s farmers. The main solution devised by the federal government for agriculture, and implemented in 1933 in the form of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, was to reduce farm production and thereby force up prices by paying farmers not to produce. This act, along with the second Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, generally benefited farmers in direct proportion to the amount of land that they could not farm. Thus, the larger the land holdings, the greater the government payments.
The two main consequences of this were that as less land was being cultivated, sharecroppers and farm laborers were dismissed and displaced, becoming part of the large transient population of the decade and made famous as “Okies”; large landowners received substantial government funds, enabling them to mechanize their operations, thus decreasing still further the need for labor. The onset of World War II finally rescued America from the Great Depression. Large landowners, who had capitalized on the New Deal policies, were well-placed to meet and profit from the increased demand for agricultural produce that the war generated.
The second half of the 20th century, in many ways, continued the trends in agriculture that were established during the previous half century: consolidation, technological influence, and government involvement. However, all of these trends were to reach new heights by the start of the third millennium.

After World War II, large-scale commercial farmers steadily increased their share of the country’s agricultural wealth. Continuing to receive more in government subsidies than small-scale farmers, they were able to adopt new machinery, seed, fertilizer, and computers to maximize their production. At the same time, agribusinesses flourished. These large, vertically integrated operations, sometimes owned by farmer cooperatives, as in the case of Crystal Sugar, controlled food production literally from the ground to the store. The main thing that distinguished agribusinesses from the large commercial farms was that the owners of the land not only did not work it, but also did not even have to see it.
With huge amounts of money thrust at agricultural improvements, American farmers and landowners embarked on introducing technology to agriculture with a new, aggressive efficiency. From pumping water from the Ogallala aquifer to aerial spraying of crops with herbicides and pesticides, from hybridizing soft fruits and vegetables to endure the rigors of travel to genetically modifying crops to make them disease and chemical resistant, success in farming became more removed from nature and more dependent on science and technology than ever before. This ensured that American farmlands were more productive than ever, while overproduction and consequent low farm prices continue to be a national problem today.
However, an increasing number of people are questioning the validity, sustainability, and healthfulness of such artificial farming. This is reflected in the growing interest, both here and abroad, in organic farming and in rescuing traditional, heritage varieties of plants and animals from extinction.
The federal government continued and increased its support of agriculture. Having made the decision to subsidize food production in the nation rather than letting prices find their own, perhaps much higher levels, the government consistently responded to the farm lobby by providing payments for everything from set-aside land to price supports on commodities. Additional subsidies are often hidden in the form of large grants to agricultural research designed to increase the production that is already keeping prices low.

Farmer organizations remained active in the postwar period, although, as the average farm size grew, they split into two camps. On the one hand, a number of farm workers’ unions emerged, trying to improve the status of the laborer in the field. The most colorful, famous, and successful of these was the United Farm Workers of America led by Cesar Chavez. Active in the 1960s and 1970s, the organization did achieve some benefits for its migrant members, but these were paltry in comparison with continued company profits. On the other hand, commercial farmers have had considerable success with their farm lobby in maintaining government price supports and the imbalance in favor of larger landowners.
Finally, the late 20th century saw a globalization of agriculture on a tremendous scale. Increasingly, farmland in America, as well as elsewhere, is held by multinational companies. This facilitates the flow of money and sometimes disease around the world, but does not seem to have had much of an impact on the movement of food from regions of plenty to areas of scarcity.

By Claire Strom in the book "Encyclopedia of American Business",Charles R. Geisst (Editor), Facts on File, New York, 2006, p.144-151. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.