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  • A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929
  • Paul Salstrom
A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929. By Paul K. Conkin. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Pp. xiv, 223.)

Paul K. Conkin has long been one of America's most competent historians. His 1959 book Tomorrow a New Worldinaugurated the scholarly study of the New Deal's subsistence homestead communities. After that, he was long in the vanguard of American religious history. And now it turns out that he's a native Appalachian from rural East Tennessee. A Revolution Down on the Farmincludes an evocative memoir of his farm childhood during the Great Depression and World War II. Conkin's books are always replete with facts but also bristling with evaluations. On the heels of Conkin's array of facts come his array of pros-and-cons in a barely disguised squabble with himself. Often he dismisses knowingly the same ideals that he portrays winningly.

As for the facts, don't call his long chapter explaining the New Deal's farm policy "complicated" until you reach his exegesis of federal farm policy since World War II!Both of those chapters are masterful, as is his description in a penultimate chapter of the situation as of 2007-2008. We learn that "irrigation [now] accounts for more than 80 percent of all the fresh water utilized in the United States" (171), and that American farmers "now have the best of all worlds – the right to produce all they want, and a government security blanket to protect their incomes" (140).

Meanwhile the ground is shifting under American farmers' feet, not because of the economic downturn (since, after all, demand for food is famously "inelastic"), but because of rising and roller-coastering oil prices. Thus Conkin adds a somber afterword to this book, telling us that "in all probability, cheap oil is a thing of the past" (203). He doesn't come out and say that fossil-fuel-dependent farming might become a dinosaur, but he does admit that, since the twentieth century's "enormous drawdown of such finite resources as soil, water, forests, and fossil fuels, … these realities [End Page 116]suggest a different perspective on American agriculture than I have emphasized in this book" (201-2).

One consolation for Conkin is that, "despite all the challenges, American farmers are better suited to meet them than are farmers anywhere else in the world." In a pinch, he says, Americans could quit eating so much meat, quit using food crops to make biofuels, and in a big pinch could "plant gardens in suburban yards, convert golf courses into fields, or actively farm strips along highways" (203-4). On biofuels, Conkin stops short of confessing that turning corn into ethanol is a waste of money, but he does say the last few years' surge in food prices both in the United States and worldwide have made "the existing [federal] subsidies for American farmers and the diversion of one-fourth of corn production into ethanol seem … irresponsible, or even immoral" (140).

Conkin's final chapter (except for his afterword) is devoted to "Alternatives." He provides an engrossing account of Henry C. Carey's mid-1800s agrarianism; of communal farms like those of the Hutterites (to whom he earlier devoted half of a 1964 book);of the Rodale family and how it helped the U.S. Department of Agriculture start helping organic farmers; of Scott and Helen Nearing and their organic subsistence homesteads in Vermont and Maine; of young Americans' 1970s back-to-the-land movement; and finally of the Kentucky agrarian Wendell Berry, who Conkin calls so "fully reactionary" that he's radical. Conkin doesn't deny that organic farming is more sustainable than mainstream farming. He even equates organic farming with common sense. But he asks "how more labor-intensive and environmentally friendly approaches to farming will be able to maintain the present level of agricultural productivity" (183).

Personally, I appreciate the hard work that Paul Conkin, now eighty years old, has put into this final book of his stellar career, and I have use for it. Woven deeply...

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