In 1955, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: "While early American society was an agrarian society, it was fast becoming more commercial, and commercial goals made their way among its agricultural classes almost as rapidly as elsewhere…The more farming as a self-sufficient way of life was abandoned for farming as a business, the more merit men found in what was being left behind. And the more rapidly the farmers' sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past. The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth. The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins."
We had to read Hofstadter in my first college class, a freshman requirement with 500 students, all forced to sit through three lectures and two labs a week on American Government. Rarely has so much effort been spent with so little result. The average student at the University of Missouri in 1978 was more into beer and football weekends.
I may have been the only freshman to actually read the lab assignments, but only because I didn't know any better. I still had time to go to football games, lest you think I missed the whole point of my college experience. And yes, there may have been beer involved.
The above quote captures something important about the challenges American farmers face as we deal with criticisms about the way we farm. Our customers devoutly want to think of us as small yeomen, working with our hands, close to the soil and nature in all her glory. They have sweet and sentimental memories of grandpa's farm, where the new born calves frolicked in pastures and the cows were all named, and Saturday nights were spent on the main street of some bucolic small town where Mom and Dad met over milk shakes at the local teen hangout.
(Actually, that's a pretty accurate description of the farms my parents grew up on, and my mom and dad's courtship, and our farm still satisfies most of the requirements of the agrarian myth checklist.)
Of course, our farm is also what our critics would call 'industrial.' Notice how I qualify that word. I do this to maintain marital peace. My wife objects passionately to the idea that what we do might be called industrial in any sense of that word. She has too often been privy to the decision-making process here at Hurst Farms, and can't imagine that General Electric executives gather around their Mom's kitchen table and argue for hours over a plan.
Industrial baggage It is certain that our critics load the term industrial with a whole lot of baggage. It's short hand for everything they see as bad in the way food is produced.
On the other hand, as Today's Farmer editor Steve Fairchild points out, any system that successfully provides food for 300 million Americans is going to have industrial characteristics.
I see my wife's point, but at the same time don't necessarily believe that industrial has to carry so much negative baggage. Industry is a good thing, as opposed to laziness. A local industry that needs employees is a good thing when you don't have a job, and the efficiency that comes from industrial management isn't to be sneezed at.
Along with the nostalgia we have for small farms and bustling communities of my grandparents' day, it's good to remember the kind of lives that our ancestors led. March 1 was moving day, when tenant farmers moved from farm to farm; the long days of backbreaking and mind-numbing labor; and the poverty that was most farmer's lot as recently as a generation ago.
My mother grew up on a small farm with seven siblings. Things we take for granted were once her childhood treats. We have to keep that in mind when we mourn the loss of pre-industrial agriculture. Industry in that last sentence is used in a totally non-judgmental way, as a description of the substitution of capital for labor, tractors for mules, and Roundup for hoes.
This argument over how we see ourselves, and how others see us, has been going on as long as people have been thinking about American farming.
Back in the early 19th century Alexis De Tocqueville noted that American farmers viewed their holdings more like capitalists than peasants. They would sell their farms and move on to other businesses or other lands - a practice unheard of in Europe. "Almost all the farmers of the United States," he wrote, "combine some trade with agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade."
Americans love family farms, and hate American agriculture. Our problem is to make sure they understand that the distinction between the two is impossible to make.
Truth is often messy. We believe in that agricultural myth, live it every day, but the same family farm that has existed in the same place for five or six generations is also likely to be a very sophisticated business, using what can only be called "industrial" means to reach Grandma and Grandpa's ends.