Field Work by the Sage of East Tennessee

After decades of neglect, agriculture has been much in the news over the past few years. To be sure, much of the interest is an accidental outgrowth of the increasing fixation among wealthy, self-absorbed foodies in what they ingest, but agricultural historians, who have been off in the corner mumbling to themselves for generations, are not complaining. If it takes the Food Network, Gastronomica, the one-two combination of Michael Pollan and Anthony Bourdain, alleged obesity epidemics, fear-mongering over GMOs, and an even scarier thought—Rachael Ray—to get people's attention, so be it.

More seriously, agriculture has become increasingly visible because of broader concerns relating to climate change, rising food costs, food security, environmental degradation, population pressure, economic development in Africa, and other topical worries. To cut to the quick, both social and natural scientists all over the globe are trying to come up with strategies that will allow the world's farmers, over the next forty years or so, somehow to grow 40 to 50 percent more food—the world's population is expected to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.0 or 9.5 billion or so by 2050—while using less water, less fertilizer, and fewer pesticides and herbicides. They urge reducing our carbon footprints in other ways as well, whether by rendering global supply chains more efficient, or by converting more and more of the world's people into herbivores or at least locavores. However much momentum the "slow food" movement gains, agricultural strategists must perforce move fast if we're to have any chance of feeding the world's growing population forty years hence.

In order to move expeditiously, it helps to know whence one came, and no agricultural system in the world has moved as far or as fast as that of the United States over the past seventy-five or eighty years, as Paul Conkin makes clear in A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929. Indeed, it is difficult even today fully to comprehend the magnitude of the changes that have occurred in the U.S. agricultural sector over the past four generations. In 1930 fully 25 percent of the American labor force was comprised of farmers; today's figure is about 1 percent, and most of those are farming only part-time (p. 3). In 1930 only about 15 percent of American farms had tractors; today almost all farms do (p. 19). In 1930 more than 90 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. was shucked by hand; today just about the only "cornhuskers" we ever hear about wear red uniforms and play for the University of Nebraska (p. 15). In 1930 one farm family could raise almost enough food to feed ten other families. Today about 320,000 farms account for almost 90 percent of the food and fiber produced in the U.S., enough to satisfy the demand of more than 300-odd million Americans (p. 98). And this demand is met at an amazingly and historically cheap price (if not cost): food chews up only about 13 percent of American income—8 percent for food consumed at home and another 5 percent for that consumed in restaurants (p. 49).

Conkin, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Vanderbilt University and author of dozens of books on wildly different subjects—from antebellum political economists to the Scopes trial to Peabody College to LBJ—details these vast changes in A Revolution Down on the Farm, and he does so with both formidable erudition and considerable charm. To paraphrase biographer Richard Brookhiser's observation regarding Alexander Hamilton, Paul Conkin is a know-it-all who actually does seem to know it all. Thus, we find the author holding forth in learned fashion—albeit a bit pontifically at times—on matters ranging from the cutter bars on combines to the intricacies of New Deal...