A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture Since 1929 by Paul K. Conkin (review)

BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2009 87 P aul K. Conkin seeks to explain dramatic changes in agriculture during his lifetime. To do so, he wrestles with a huge topic: the factors that contributed to the production revolution, including mechanization, chemical applications, and farm policy . The topic allows him to revisit his origins as a farm boy in east Tennessee. It also allows him to address a conundrum of immense proportions: measuring the relative economic costs associated with a declining number of farmers feeding a growing world population . Conkin believes that the decline in the number of farmers is a small price to pay for efficiency. Agriculture “has been the most successful sector in the recent economic history of the United States” (x). Furthermore, agriculture accounts for “the most important industrial revolution in American history” (97), experiencing at least a 50 percent increase in full-sector productivity during a single generation , roughly 1950-1970. This industrial revolution allowed a dramatically shrinking number of farmers to maintain the nation’s agricultural output. Conkin does not wax nostalgic, but he does not let discussions about rural outmigration or decline in rural society and culture, or other unanticipated costs of the production revolution, dissuade him from his ultimate claim that agriculture must remain efficient, and Paul K. Conkin. A Revolution Down on the Farm:The Transformation of American Agriculture Since 1929. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. 240 pp. ISBN: 9780813125190 (cloth), $29.95. A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture Since 1929 Paul K. Conkin BOOK REVIEWS 88 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY efficiency depends on mechanization, science, and policy. Between 1929 and 2009, the U.S. lost more than 5.5 million farm operators , but the remaining three hundred and fifty thousand maintain production levels that sustain a critical sector in the U.S. economy. Conkin explains how his family fit into the pre-production revolution majority on their small diversified tobacco farm in east Tennessee, and how they remained in the majority as their small-scale subsistence methods gave way to specialized commercial agriculture after World War II. The Tennessee contingent shifted to parttime farming and became dependent on off-farm employment. Conkin devotes a chapter to changes in farm policy necessitated by the Great Depression and imposed by the New Deal. He indicates the wide reaching consequences of U.S. farm policy, dependent on international cooperation, but limited by nationalist views on trade and credit availability . Ultimately, New Deal agricultural policies stand as the most concentrated effort on the part of the national government to aid one sector of the economy. All of the diverse policies had one thing in common: “all production controls, all payments for compliance, and all price support programs were based on levels of production ” (76). The production revolution that began in earnest after World War II across the globe depended on four synchronous developments, according to Conkin: machinery, electrification, chemical inputs, and plant and animal breeding. Farmers who embraced production agriculture invested in these technologies, and they sought government policy that would support their effort to grow what they wanted; in other words, they wanted a free market. Consumers, however, wanted low prices. Post-war policy appealed to both interests by ensuring that demand for agricultural products remained high. Conkin draws on his experiences, corroborated with primary and secondary evidence. This provides context for the larger story he tells about farm policy and the agricultural revolution beyond his family’s farmyards . Yet, he draws on too limited a pool of secondary sources to support his interpretation of the larger story. Three studies that address the federal government’s farmer policy in historic context include Kathryn Marie Dudley’s Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland (2000), R. Douglas Hurt’s Problems of Progress: The American Farmer in the Twentieth Century (2002), and Jane Adams, ed., Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed (2002). Each addresses farmer dependency on policy, competition fostered by policy, and political wrangling over policy. Each also relates the historic context to the current situation. Conkin, the historian, is most persuasive when explaining the past, BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2009 89 T he tragic story of the life of Elizabeth...