Small Farms and Family Farms
Deep down Americans, at least those who have been born and raised in the States and gone to American schools, deep down they know that the family farm is just the way a farm is meant to be.
Most of the rest of the world, including immigrants to the US like me, have not been raised with the family farm as self evidently natural organizing principle of agriculture, the Platonic form of how the land should be worked. We may think family farms should be the norm but that’s a conclusion we have come to, not one to which we have been born and bred.
Yet the belief that the family farm and the yeoman farmer were the backbone of the state is one that, although not unknown before, became common currency only in United States only in the 1850s. Then it was embodied in the Homestead Act of 1862 in which citizens had the right to 160 acres of undeveloped land anywhere outside the original 13 colonies.
By the mid twentieth century when the program ended 10% of all the land in the now-much-bigger United States, the to-me unimaginable area of 270 million acres had been handed over. Children had been raised reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s delightful Little House on the Prairie or had watched episode after episode on television. Plus of course they heard about all this in school.
And as in the twentieth century, family farms began their long decline, the story of failed farms became the story of family farmers driven off their land and a way of life coming to an end, mourned in prose by John Steinbeck and in song by Willie Nelson.
Now, as I will explain in a later post, I think the family farm was an ingenious and largely beneficial way of opening the American frontier.
I also think that as a picture of what farms have been and should be, it’s misleading. (1) The Homestead Act implanted the idea (lovely but pretty rare in human history) that farm land was free and a right of the citizen. (2) To that it added the idea that the family farm was human-size, 160 acres (1/4 square mile) . And (3) that the family farm was worked by the nuclear family, passing down from generation to generation.
Of course, once you think about it this has never been and probably shouldn’t be.
(1) Farmland has rarely been free even in the past. Farmland was often granted as spoils of war, sometimes taken as part of supposedly empty or undeveloped land, but once populations grew, and certainly today, farmland has a price and a very high one. One thing farmers usually had to do and now absolutely have to do is pay the mortgage or the rent or offset the opportunity costs of not investing the money elsewhere (perhaps by hoping the prices of farmland will rise yet further).
(2) Family farms don’t necessarily come in the perfect size to give a decent income to a nuclear family: some have been too small to prosper, some have been huge. For the latter, consider Prince Charles. He inherited the Duchy of Cornwall, 135,000 acres largely in farms scattered across Southwest England. To be fair, it’s in trust so he can’t sell it. But in the last reported year it brought in 16 million pounds sterling (at least $25 million). The haciendas of Mexico, the estancias of much of the rest of Spanish America, the big farms of Australia, come to that the estates of ancient Rome and ancient China were frequently family-owned but they most certainly weren’t small.
Small family farms (the kind described by Diana Buja) by contrast often suffered the direst poverty.
(3) Large family farms, therefore, weren’t worked by the family. They depended on peons, slaves, sharecroppers, wealthy tenant farmers, farmhands, and all kinds of different labor. They, just like modern corporate farms, were big business.
In short the brief and reasonably happy period of the American family farm in the Midwest and West in the late nineteenth century and twentieth century up to the dust bowl is not typical. It’s a historical oddity. And that ought to make us ponder. Was this because everyone had it wrong (and I’m certainly not defending, say, plantation slavery). Or does the family have limitations in farming as in other businesses?
“Most of the rest of the world, including immigrants to the US like me, have not been raised with the family farm as self evidently natural organizing principle of agriculture, the Platonic form of how the land should be worked. ”
At times like this I know I’m not quite American. Even though I moved to the States when I was 5, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around this assumption. I grew up reading the same literature, watching Little House on the Prarie, same history lessons, etc..
This stuff isn’t just nostalgia and myths anymore. It’s been glamorized by people who are very far removed from the land and the kind of real work it requires.
Ji-Young and Cindy, thanks for the comments. It’s always useful to be reminded of the power of school curricula to shape our thinking, something I find almost scary sometimes. Love the family story, Cindy. The desire to own land is strong and I think even stronger in the past when it was the only way to wealth except for plunder. Do you know anything about the Danish family farm?
My husband’s family were family farmers as described here — 400 acres, Wisconsin, land bought by immigrant Danish father. I think one thing that drove the farm idea, aside from the need to settle the frontier (and get rid of the Native American threat) was the desire on the part of people from Europe to own land, to escape the large fiefdoms and the droit du seigneur so prevalent for so long. BTW, the Danish family owned a small farm on the old sod.
“(3) Large family farms, therefore, weren’t worked by the family. They depended on peons, slaves, sharecroppers, wealthy tenant farmers, farmhands, and all kinds of different labor. They, just like modern corporate farms, were big business.”
My 5th grade daughter is learning about the colonial period in American history right now. School textbooks have changed quite a bit since I was the same age. There’s more emphasis on the business and economics of the colonial period, including all the human labor required to run plantations.
Manifest Destiny is presented as an ideological tool, rather than an inherently right thing, good thing.
It will be interesting to see what the POV is in contemporary education relative to the Homestead Act, which will be covered later in the curriculum for her.
When I was growing up these ideas were much more cloaked in patriotism and a sense of being American.
I recently read that when Europeans came over to the American colonies, well before the expansion westward, that the primary goal for most was to own a piece of land and to be self-sufficient. Apparently these men (and their families) refused all offers of better paying jobs in manufacturing and were determined to half-starve on their own property rather than give up that independence for cash. I can’t off hand recall my source. Westward expansion was about, among trhe other things you mention, land hunger.
Just to add, both of my parents grew up on small family farms in the American south. I do mean small. That was certainly no route to prosperity. Independence, yes. A lot of fun? not so much. It is a hard life.
If you are looking at it from a histrorical point of view then I shouldn’t dismiss these settlers farms in the USA, Canada, Australia etc out of hand. Without the huge amounts of cheap grain and meat that where exported back to the Old World then it is doubtful if the industrial revolution would have kicked off quite so quickly or maybe it would have developed elsewhere in stead. The UK has been dependent on imported wheat since the early 19th century, it would be interesting to find out what sort of farms this grain was coming from. So in this sense these farms are very real.
In terms of prosperity v independence, I don’t think that it was that clear cut. If your were a farm labourer in mid 19th century Wiltshire, then even a marginal 160 acres in the New World would be a pretty attractive proposition. The vast majority of these early settlers were not swapping a small farm in the UK for a slightly bigger one in Australia etc, they were going from a being a farm labourer with very little control over their lives and that of their families to something that might be a much better. I think that for people in this position that it is quite difficult to give up this independence, even several generations later.
In terms of modern farming. 160 acres is very small. Technology has changed a lot. In my own family, a farm that was settled in the mid-19th century (a few thousand acres, not hundreds), supported a large family, multiple farm workers, a full time gardener plus seasonal workers. Now the same property is managed by a couple of men. 160 acres now is very small and not a useful size for many styles farming. But if the land is fertile and there is a good water supply then it is quite big enough for many types of farming. You might no feed the world off it, but farmers are not trying to feed the world.
Adam, I’m not ignoring your long and thoughtful post with which I almost entirely agree. Just firing up for a post on CAFOs that will come back to some of these issues. Plus the Economist recently had an article praising the Australian water trading schemes. Do you know anything about these?
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-greenhouse14-2009may14,0,4784175.story
LA Times article about greenhouse farming in California. It seems to me the answer to the “ills” of industrial agriculture will be better technology, not an escape backwards into fantastical version of the past.
You’re not going to get any argument from me on that issue, Ji-Young. But you knew that already!