An Urban's Rural View

I'm sending this from Soccoro, N.M., the latest stop on our meandering migration from Washington, D.C., to Newport, Ore. My bedside reading for this transcontinental trek is "From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur: The Transformation of Midwestern Agriculture," a 2005 book by Dennis S. Noordin and Roy V. Scott.

The opening pages are a bit dense but brimming with tantalizing historical facts. Example: Today we take ever-increasing farm consolidation for granted, but in Indiana between 1850 and 1900 the opposite occurred. Acres planted more than tripled, to 16,680,000 from 5,000,000, while average farm size fell, to 98 acres from 136.

Why? "Divisions of existing farms among siblings and pioneering entries on marginal acreage," according to the book. How could these shrinking farms survive? The authors don't spell out the answer but they hint it was because subsistence agriculture was the norm.

The country's population was still heavily rural. There weren't yet enough city dwellers to support commercial agriculture on anything like today's scale. Farm families ate most of what they grew, and a small diversified farm could produce enough food for the farm family to subsist.

Another example: Contrary to what we might assume, big increases in agricultural productivity weren't just a 20th century phenomenon. "A ton of hay that had taken twenty-one hours to plant and harvest in 1850 required fewer than four hours in 1900; the requirement for a bushel of corn had dwindled from one hour to twenty-four minutes."

As the authors sum it up, the common understanding that agricultural methods had changed little from Roman days to 1900 contains "little truth." The steam thresher was but one of the many late 19th-century technological innovations.

It makes you want to ask: When romantics insist that we must revert to farming the way our ancestors did, how far back do they want to go?

(CZ)

© Copyright 2013 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.