Preserving the Family Farm:  Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940
Mary C. Neth. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Reviewed by Jan Anderson, doctoral candidate in anthropology, University of Western Australia, Perth.

    This is a history of agricultural economic restructuring with a difference.  By making gender, family, and local community central to her study, Mary Neth successfully questions dominant thought about the inherent or natural value of ãefficiencyä and ãdevelopmentä in modern farming in the United States.  Nethâs writing style is engaging and accessible to a broad readership.  It would make useful reading for agricultural policy makers, farm groups, scholars, and many others associated with primary industry.

    The book spans forty years of change in the western Midwest.  Drawing on oral histories, diaries, historical farm surveys, departmental archives, and more, Neth provides detailed portrayals of actual farm families and their daily lives. She gives comparative examples from the major Midwestern areas with agricultural specialization in the 20th century÷dairy, corn and livestock, and wheat.   She also examines the works of some key figures and organizations in national and regional agricultural development initiatives of the time.

    In doing so, Neth skillfully articulates between broad-based structural changes in U.S. agriculture and everyday farm family strategies for survival.  She demonstrates that Midwestern farmers had cultural traditions of their own, which were challenged by state and corporate plans to develop agriculture.  Neth shows that agricultural restructuring has not been a uniform process.  Rather, it has taken place over long periods of time, and has been met with both resistance and support from rural populations in different ways.  She proposes that ã·change came through an interactive process in which farm people adopted, adapted, and resisted new practices, and government policies both created new conditions and reacted to the choices and actions of farm peopleä (p. 6).

    At the turn of the 20th century, many Midwestern farmers had small-scale mixed agricultural operations.  By being diversified, farmers could attempt to secure a return from variable and uncertain markets.   Men, women, and children all played fundamental roles in farm work and income generation.  Female activities which commonly contributed to the farm economy included growing fruit and vegetables for home consumption, raising poultry, trading eggs on local markets, milking cows, and churning butter for sale.

    Farm families valued physical labor and work skills, in both males and females (though there were variations on the basis of ethnicity and class). Unpaid family labor was a resource that farmers could consistently utilize even when cash was not available.  Neighborly obligations, such as regular visiting and the non-commercial exchange of labor and goods, were also common strategies for meeting social and economic needs in the community.  Further, ãmaking doä with available material resources, improvising, and reserving money were highly regarded.
 
    However, U.S. rural development policies challenged this.  Neth argues that state agricultural institutions and regulations grew out of the lobbying efforts of wealthy ãgentlemen farmersä and agribusiness operators who stood to gain from farmers purchasing more of their goods.  By the turn of the 20th century, alleviating rural poverty was high on the federal governmentâs agenda.  Influential lobbyists proposed that lifting commercial productivity by introducing new, more efficient, labor saving technologies would increase farm incomes.  However, Neth holds that these strategies most often served to support wealthy farmers who could afford intensive capital input and the spoils of scientific experimentation, along with those companies from whom they bought supplies.  Poorer rural families continued to leave their farms, and this situation worsened through the Great Depression.
 
    Neth uses the introduction of the combine harvester as a case in point.  Purchasing a combine and converting a farm for its use were expensive.  Increased farm investment often meant indebtedness in communities where families, wary of former times of scarcity, valued saving money.  Having a combine discouraged diversified agriculture because a large crop acreage was needed to make the purchase worthwhile.  However, increased grain production from combine harvesting eventually saturated markets and forced grain prices downward.  Newly specialized grain farmers then found themselves without alternative commercial income sources.  Labor requirements were, furthermore, lower than in older harvest techniques.  In effect, combine harvesting undermined the use of unpaid labor as a survival strategy, and introduced extra fixed costs on farms (such the purchase of a tractor and fuel) that could only be met with cash.  Neth asserts that many farmers resisted the introduction of combines not because they were backward or incapable of change, but because they already had their own strategies of sharing unpaid family and community labor, diversifying income streams, maintaining cash reserves, and helping to keep each other on the land.

    At the same time, state and privately sponsored initiatives to lift up farming women from the ãdrudgeryä of farm work and poverty emphasized an idealized middle-class separation of male and female work spheres.  In these nuclear-family visions (taught in high school home economics classes, for example) a women was not a farm laborer but a leisured consumers of labor saving household goods, such as electrical appliances.  A good husband would earn enough cash income for her to buy goods for the household without having to depend on others for assistance. In this way, private corporations and the state devalued womenâs traditional economic roles on family farms and their maintenance of intra-community exchange systems. Neth also shows how the separation of male ãcommercialä and female ãdomesticä spheres permeated the development of research into agriculture and rural policy. Research directed toward scientific experimentation and increased commercial production was privileged in state-sponsored agricultural extension projects.  However, the study of farm and community ãsocial issuesä and household economies were, for example, relegated to what was claimed to be an inferior feminine domestic sphere.<1>

    In her conclusion, Neth asserts that by better understanding the past, we might find clues about how to create a ãnew agricultureä that can ã·meet the needs of communities and the land more than simply the needs of productionä(p. 273).  For those of us who are considering the future of agriculture, some important questions arise.  In Australia, some state governments have begun to reduce production-oriented agricultural extension services to farmers. With the prospective transferal of this role to private consultants and corporate agencies, the only Australian farmers able to access production advice in the future may be those who can afford to pay for it.  In effect, this could widen existing gaps between the haves and have-nots of modern Australian farming.  State agriculture departments are beginning to focus instead on human resource support in areas such as community development and enterprise management training. However, in a rapidly changing world, it would seem that flexibility and innovation in production techniques are still necessary as well.   In the future, is there room for extension service providers to take an integrated approach to agriculture, considering both production techniques and social sustainability in farming?

Notes

1. My own study of ãsocial issuesä in Australian dairy industry restructuring sometimes met with similar responses from government representatives, as did the work of a colleague studying in another industry.