Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (review)

In Every Farm a Factory, Deborah Fitzgerald investigates the effort of agribusinessmen, government officials, rural lenders, and land-grant economists, farm management specialists, engineers, and extension agents to impart an "industrial logic or ideal" to agriculture after World War I and to tie farmers into an increasingly integrated national "matrix" of production and consumption (pp. 3, 4).

In a series of instructive and well-crafted chapters, Fitzgerald discusses the challenge of industrializing (really, Taylorizing) the diverse, complex, and fragmented American agricultural system; the particular perspectives and contributions of agricultural economists, farm management specialists, and engineers; specific experiments in professional management and large-scale production, such as those of M. L. Wilson and Tom Campbell in Montana; and the involvement of Americans in the Soviet effort of the late 1920s and early 1930s to grow wheat on a massive scale. Fitzgerald emphasizes the difficulties of turning every farm into a factory, especially those presented by uncooperative climate and recalcitrant farmers and farm workers. Yet she concludes that the industrializers generally succeeded in transforming agriculture, with substantial "costs . . . in financial, environmental, or human terms" (p. 189).

Every Farm a Factory brims with insights and explorations of little-studied people and phenomena. Fitzgerald's chapters on farm management experts and the Soviet experiment are alone worth the price of the book. However, there are some aspects of this book that strike me as unsatisfactory.

The first problem involves the period on which Fitzgerald focuses. She emphasizes the significance of the industrializing impulse in the 1920s, which is well and good, but that impulse existed both earlier and later. In the late nineteenth century, "bonanza" wheat farms in North Dakota, California, and Washington, massive interstate and even international cattle ranches on the high plains, and huge cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta displayed a degree of central organization, efficient deployment of resources, and capitalization that led observers to herald them as applications of industrial ideals to agriculture. Prior to World War I the Country Life Movement sought to encourage organization and efficiency among farmers so as to make them up-to-date producers in the industrial age. Federal farm programs introduced in the 1930s encouraged and rewarded industrial producers, while diminishing the price risks that had bedeviled the Tom Campbells of the world. And the post-1940 production revolution diminished natural risk, while making it easier for fewer people to handle more land and produce more commodities. I have to be shown that the 1920s were especially important, and Fitzgerald does not show me.

The other significant problem with this book is that Fitzgerald inadvertently falls into the error her subjects fell into—she tends to see farmers as objects of reform rather than as people with their own attitudes and agendas. We learn more here about what agricultural engineers and farm management specialists thought farmers were like than we learn about what they were really like. While it is true that few farmers worked under Taylorite principles (how many industrial workers actually did?), most were commercial producers and always had been, and many functioned in large business structures such as co-ops. Relative to most other farmers in the world, they operated on a large scale, were highly mechanized, and depended heavily on outside capital, often in substantial quantities. In common with industrialists, they were acutely conscious of labor, resource, tax, and tariff policies that affected their businesses, and they belonged to national organizations that magnified their voices in Washington. When they failed to follow the latest farm management idea that came out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the local land-grant college, they were sometimes being conservative or stubborn or even anti-intellectual, and sometimes they were calculating their interest quite rationally or were demonstrating a very reasonable suspicion of those who seemed to blame farmers for problems of farming that...