Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture (review)

On the jacket of Douglas Harper's Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture there is a photograph of two men and a boy making hay. One man is tossing the crop forkful by forkful onto a wagon, the other is stacking it on the wagon, and the boy drives the Cletrac tractor that is pulling the wagon. This photo is from the Standard Oil of New Jersey (SNOJ) collection, which includes thousands of images from the 1940s and 1950s and is held at the University of Louisville. The SNOJ photographs serve as one of Harper's two primary sources for Changing Visions; the other is interviews he conducted with farm women and men.

The role of technology in American agriculture during the twentieth century is well covered in works of regional history such as Gilbert Fite's treatment of southern farming in Cotton Fields No More (1984) and Mary Neth's Midwestern-oriented Preserving the Family Farm (1995), and in more general studies like R. Douglas Hurt's Agricultural Technology in the Twentieth Century (2000). Harper's Changing Visions adds a new wrinkle with its combination of interviews and images. He blends the interests of a sociologist with those of a cultural and technological historian; the result is a rich narrative and a valuable photographic resource.

Changing Visions describes the transformation of agriculture in upstate New York, a region where a typical dairy farm before World War II would have had no more than a few dozen cows, and where its 1990s successor ran a hundred animals or more. Harper examines the seasonal nature of agricultural work in the 1930s and 1940s, and the important place that human labor retained in farming during that era. Even though mechanization had already revolutionized agriculture by the late nineteenth century, as late as 1950 farming still required a great deal of handwork: loading hay onto wagons, shocking oats and wheat and feeding the grain into threshing machines, loading cow manure into spreaders—the list of chores is a long one. The book's focus shifts among a variety of topics related to its central theme: the mechanization of making hay, the diminishing need for oats (which had been grown as feed for horses), the increasing production of corn for fodder, and the reliance on massive lagoons for liquid manure storage.

Gazing at a photograph showing a crew of eleven men around a dinner table, the reader cannot help but be struck by the amount of labor it took to thresh grain with a stationary steam engine. In contrast, a combine or forage harvester might need a crew of only two—one to drive the machine, the other to drive the truck or wagon to the storage bin or silo. The new mechanization, determined by the speed of a tractor as opposed to a horse, dramatically boosted productivity and changed the nature of farm work. Harper argues that the increasing scale and the transition to internal-combustion agricultural machinery destroyed the social network of rural America. The abandonment of horses for tractors, he writes, "was to redefine farming itself" (p. 53). As farming moved from a craft tradition to a sort of factory, the relationship between neighbors that had played such an important role disappeared. On the surface, this is an elementary thesis, but Harper examines it in multiple ways. He reflects, for example, on issues related to gender roles in what could easily have been just a study of men's work.

Harper's unfamiliarity with the machinery occasionally leads him astray, and he sometimes neglects to pay due attention to the drudgery of farm work before mechanization. Harvesting crops in freezing weather is more pleasant inside the heated cab of a combine, and instances where new technology increased human comfort are underexplored.

Though historians of technology often talk about the obliteration of time and space, what has happened in rural America...