American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost (review)

American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century is an economic profile of the changes in rural life and the business of farming. Bruce L. Gardner, Distinguished University Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park, synthesizes a complex body of economic history and marshals statistical evidence to show how American agriculture succeeded and what that success cost. Gardner acknowledges the widespread human suffering and ecological degradation of American agriculture, but his account is largely optimistic, concluding that, in spite of the many problems, the gains from the changes in the agricultural economy have been greater than the costs. In spite of economic difficulties over the course of the century, Gardner contends, American farm families at the end of the twentieth century enjoyed a uniformly high standard of living at or above the average level of urban prosperity. These relatively prosperous farm families have managed to grow greater quantities of inexpensive food while simultaneously limiting or reducing costs such as soil erosion and ecological contamination.

Gardner employs a topical approach that is familiar to students of agriculture, focusing on technology, farm and community structure, and government policy, showing how farm production has become increasingly concentrated since World War II. Large farms have become dominant in postwar agriculture, with 6 percent of American farms generating half of the total $150 billion in sales of U.S. farm products in 1997. A dynamic group of farmers gained this position through aggressive use of technology, capital, marketing, vertical integration, and favorable public policy. Although this aggressive minority of American farmers has clearly emerged as a success story in Gardner's account, he does not neglect the smaller farmers or the people who left agriculture. He argues that smaller farmers have been able to remain in agriculture in part because of their ability to tap into nonfarm economies, allowing them to enhance their standard of living. The people who left farming generally enjoyed a higher standard of living after they moved to urban areas, since they left in response to growth in other sectors of the economy rather than to inherent conditions of agriculture. Other evidence will likely surprise readers. It is widely known that manufactured inputs were a growing part of farming in the past hundred years, but Gardner shows that the biggest increases occurred before, rather than after, World War II, even though the average farm size began to increase dramatically in the postwar years.

Gardner's insights into the connections between farm and nonfarm economic systems are some of the author's most interesting contributions to the story of changes in rural life.

As the author notes in the preface, the book will be most valuable to agricultural economists and economic historians. Students and nonspecialists will find the statistics, figures, and graphs helpful, but they may get lost in the barrage of numbers throughout the text. Nonspecialists will find Gardner's explanations of how economists use statistics interesting, as well as his assessment of the strengths and limitations of economic history. Historians and sociologists will also find the book useful, although the emphasis on percentages, numbers, and dollar amounts often ignores human relationships that cannot be quantified. These qualitative relationships also help explain how American agriculture flourished and what it cost. Still, the book is well argued, well written, and full of interesting and enlightening examples of the important changes in American agriculture, making it a valuable contribution to our understanding of the business of farming in the past century.