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

The history of American agriculture in the twentieth century is a story of scientific and technological achievement, activist federal government, and remarkable productivity. It is also a story of violence, racism, and dispossession, among a host of other factors, both good and ill, that have shaped the history of the countryside. Despite the salience of agriculture to the American experience, much remains to be said about its recent history. The scholars who have studied American agriculture in historical context have included economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers. Their chief concerns have been technology, government policy, social change, ethnicity, and agricultural economics. Each discipline brings a particular emphasis and methodology to research and analysis, and each tends to ignore the others. This study is no different.

Bruce. L. Gardner, Distinguished University Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of Maryland, has provided a sweeping econometric overview of American agriculture during the twentieth century. His intent was to address the reasons for increased productivity and farm income as well as the changes in farm size and population. Gardner is concerned with economic winners and losers and the role of government policy in promoting marketing, trade, and expansion. He has met his goal with an economic introduction to the major reasons for agricultural change and development in the United States. His is a fact-filled, positive economic history. It is, however, a history without people.

Gardner analyzes technological change, economic structures, out-migration, rural poverty, commodity markets, and government policy, among other topics, and in several concluding chapters seeks to explain what the data mean. He does not tell scholars of American agricultural history much that is new, but he adds to our understanding important details based on econometric analysis. He points out that farm poverty has declined, and that agricultural income now approximates the average income of nonfarm households. This is due, in part, to flight from the land and also to government policies. Gardner does not systematically trace the development of those policies, but rather touches on the highlights. His conclusions are clear but already known: "the growth of agriculture as a sector of the economy is provided by investment, farm productivity improvement, and governmental support for agricultural research" (p. 337). Government price-support programs, of course, gave it some stability.

American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century will appeal primarily to agricultural economists. Gardner's econometric approach and willingness to ignore the rich historical literature on twentieth-century agriculture relegate it to the category of reference book. Historians may consider the chapter on technology a useful introduction, if they can accept Gardner's caveat: "Most disappointingly, despite decades of investigation by agricultural economists, no widely accepted specific mathematical representation of U.S. agricultural technology has been found" (p. 38).