Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community

2. From Subsistence to Production: How American Agriculture Was Made Modern

c h a p t e r 2 From Subsistence to Production How American Agriculture Was Made Modern   Agriculture and Rural Life Less than one hundred years ago most rural households in the United States sustained themselves by farming. While some agricultural products were sold for money on the open market , others were produced solely for household consumption or for bartering with neighbors. All family members, including husbands, wives, and children, contributed their labor to the economic maintenance and survival of the household. While there was a well-established division of labor along gender and age lines in many farm households, there was not a well-articulated and formalized occupational structure within most rural areas. In this social and economic context, the household, the community, and the economy were tightly bound up with one another. The local economy was not something that could be isolated from society. Rather the economy was embedded in the social relations of the farm household and the rural community. Local communities served as trade and service centers for the farming population. Rural communities also served as places that nurtured participation in civic and social affairs, and as [8] such they could be viewed as nodes that anchored people to place. And, as most commentators have noted, schools played a key role in solidifying and defining community boundaries. Two early rural sociologists, John H. Kolb and Edmund de S. Brunner, describe the settlement of the Middle West and Far West this way. “Individual farms were settled by families who went out to get land and to seek their fortunes. They settled in groups on adjoining farms and were bound together by such ties as kinship, common nationality, the same education, social, or religious purposes.” Within the rural communities, “Mutual aid, exchange of work, building bees, social affairs, schools and churches soon became the organized ways of these groups.”1 In rural households, men, women, and children engaged in a wide range of productive enterprises. On the farm, they grew crops, raised animals, cleared land, built and repaired machinery, engaged in home-based manufacturing, and maintained the farmstead. A typical farm in the United States in 1870, for example, was very small by today’s standards. Most farm families survived on less than seventy-five acres. Indeed, in 1870 less than one-third of the nation’s farms had one hundred acres of improved cropland. The typical family farm produced a wide range of commodities, including dairy products (e.g., cheese, butter, milk), tobacco, fresh fruits, and vegetables . Gross sales, though crudely estimated in the nineteenth century, averaged about $1,200 a year.2 Much of what was produced was not sold on the market but rather was bartered for goods and services in the local community or else used for home consumption. Household-based productive activities in rural areas are more difficult to ascertain, since no systematic data were ever collected in this area. However, we know from historical accounts that the members of farm households produced a from subsistence to production [9] broad range of goods for their own consumption including clothes, furniture, and housewares. Labor exchanges and bartering were also an embedded feature of the economic life in rural communities. Doug Harper describes the social nature of “changing works” this way: The principle of changing works was that farmers informally organized themselves . . . to share labor. There were many forms of changing works in different regions of the country, depending on the duration of the work which needed to be done, the density of farms in a region, and the technology at a given stage of agricultural development. . . . In [Illinois in the 1920s] . . . farmers grew several crops, including large fields of grain. Each July a group of farmers in a neighborhood collectively rented a thresher, which they moved from one farm to another. Given the size of the grain fields in the region, it took a thresher crew up to two weeks to do the crop on a single farm. While harvesting the crop, the crew stayed on the farm. Thus, the farm women fed up to twenty people a day for ten to fourteen days in a row. . . . 3 Some manufacturing of durable and nondurable goods in rural areas also took place outside of farm households. Many rural communities had metalworking enterprises, woodworking shops, and related activities. The Census of 1870, for instance , shows that in the three most rural...