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A Companion to American Agricultural History. Группа авторов
Читать онлайн.Название A Companion to American Agricultural History
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119632245
Автор произведения Группа авторов
Издательство John Wiley & Sons Limited
Orchard crops and viticulture were once staples of the midwestern farm economy. While many farms had orchards for home fruit supply and cider, before World War II midwestern fruit met not only local demand but was exported beyond the region. Much of this production, however, was no longer viable after World War II. The use of selective herbicides such as 2,4-D resulted in a widespread problem, with herbicide drift damaging trees and killing broad leaf fruit vines in regions with significant corn production. In Michigan, north of the Corn Belt, cherry production surged after World War II, with mechanization displacing hand labor, starting in the 1960s (Anderson 2009; Smith-Howard 2014).
Many other crops flourished in the Midwest, providing farmers with multiple paths to prosperity. The seed industry flourished, especially before World War II, with northwest Missouri producing large quantities of bluegrass seed for hay crops until being displaced by growers in the Pacific Northwest. The business of hybrid seed corn production to prepare millions of bushels of commercial seed corn provided reliable income in the years after World War II for thousands of farmers. Even mint production was a regular feature of production agriculture in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. The extract from the peppermint plant was used in the manufacture of chewing gum, candy, toothpaste, and medicine. Persistent fungus problems and cheaper production in Washington’s irrigated Yakima Valley resulted in the declining importance of midwestern mint (Smith-Howard 2014).
One of the Midwest’s notable secondary crops was the sugar beet, thanks to surging global sugar demand in the early twentieth century. Much of the acreage dedicated to this crop in the region was located in Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska. Early growers relied on locally available European immigrants for labor but, by World War II, increasingly relied on the migrant labor pool that had come north from Mexico to work in the vegetable fields and railroads. Growers could pay the Mexican workers less and found that relying on outsiders made it easier to combat nascent unionization efforts. With the labor shortages of World War II, the US government-organized Bracero program met these needs, further enhancing the reliance on Mexican labor in midwestern beet fields. The US embargo of Cuban sugar in 1960 increased the demand for beet sugar as well as the reliance on Mexican laborers (Valdes 1991; Norris 2014; Smith-Howard 2014).
World War II initiated a significant period of reorganization of the farm. Historians Dennis Nordin and Roy Scott described it as a period of heightened entrepreneurialism. While many farmers in the region had long been associated with technological mastery, postwar conditions removed many of the restraints that had held back production (Brinkman and Hirsch 2017). The period brought new implements that were specifically designed for farm tractors, permitting broader application of the investment in tractor horsepower. Labor shortages and the spread of rural electrification meant more use of electric motors for materials handling. Antibiotics for the treatment of illness and injury kept more animals alive, while the use of subtherapeutic antibiotics in feed permitted faster gains and conversion of feed to flesh (Finlay 2004; Nordin and Scott 2005; Anderson 2009). Hybrid seed corn, introduced in the 1920s, had made rapid gains in acreage during the 1930s and 1940s, becoming a nearly universally used technology in the region by war’s end (Fitzgerald 1990; Olmstead and Rhode 2008). New hybrids were designed for the shorter growing seasons of Wisconsin and Minnesota, with other hybrids developed to resist pests such as the European corn borer (Hudson 1994; Anderson, 2009).
One of the most important changes was the abandonment of the crop rotations that were pioneered in the late nineteenth century. Those crop rotations limited the draw on soil nutrients and prevented a buildup of pathogens and insects or weed species. Wartime industrial expansion in ammonium nitrate production for ordnance and research in growth-regulator herbicides and chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides brought changes to Corn Belt farms. Eventually, farmers jettisoned their 5-year rotation due to the availability of these new farm chemicals. The oats and hay that they raised to feed draft animals was no longer needed, although the hay crop remained important for many livestock feeders. New machines such as corn picker-shellers and combines for small grains, and ultimately a combine adapted for corn, meant an abandonment of community-based threshing and the tedious season of hand corn picking. Liberated from these harvest bottlenecks and armed with new farm chemicals, farmers simultaneously industrialized and simplified their farm landscapes (Anderson 2009; Smith-Howard 2014).
Farmers in the Midwest also committed to changes in livestock raising. Despite the growing importance of pure-bred animals during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, most livestock marketed from the region were grades or cross-bred animals. It was common practice to purchase a blooded boar or to bring in a pure-bred bull for service in a mixed breed herd. Yet over the course of the twentieth century a growing percentage of farms raised blooded stock. The increased investment for pure-bred animals and the growing costs of crop production due to purchased inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides induced farmers to adopt new models: feedlots and confinement.
In the pasture system, cattle and hogs move to the feed, grazing large tracts of forage crops or even standing corn. Farmers could supplement the diet of pastured animals with corn or minerals, but animals ate at their own pace. Bringing cattle onto a feedlot meant moving the feed to the animals, which meant dedicating more land to high-fiber and carbohydrate-rich feeds. Similarly, putting hogs into confinement barns allowed the farmer to provide a carefully calibrated diet suited to the stage in the animals’ life cycle. Concrete or metal slatted floors meant no more trampling feed into the dirt. Furthermore, with closer confinement, it was relatively easier to monitor health conditions, especially for animals at vulnerable stages of the life cycle, such as gestational sows, piglets, and shoats. It was also easier to control the environment through heating or cooling, maximizing the potential uptake of nutrients and calories. Hot animals are often listless and do not eat, while cold animals use much of their caloric intake to stay warm (Finlay 2004; Anderson 2009).
Dairy farmers in the region were also quick to adopt new barns, milking parlors, and bulk handling systems. Stricter postwar health standards for the Grade A fluid milk that ended up delivered to stoops and in grocers’ cases were powerful push factors for adopting new techniques. With less labor at home, farmers who kept just a few cows for cream production got out of the business altogether. The farmers who stayed in production-built barns with “loose-housing” rather than prescribed stalls for each animal. They no longer milked at the stall while seated on the old milking stool; rather they milked in specially designed parlors with a recessed floor so that sanitary preparation of the udder and teats as well as electric-powered milkers could be performed with less stooping. Instead of dumping the fresh milk into cans by hand, glass tubes and vacuum power carried the milk into a large refrigerated tank for pick up in bulk trucks. Dairy production increased dramatically with the adoption of artificial insemination, which allowed farmers to draw on the most favorable genetics for their herds (Anderson 2009; Smith-Howard 2013).
Thanks to many of these new seeds, chemicals, tools, and techniques, farmers could cultivate more acres and take care of more animals with family labor. Land values increased in the postwar period as farmers hurried to spread these new fixed costs over more acres in the hopes of boosting farm income, a problem that was compounded by stagnant commodity prices. It was, as economist Willard Cochrane explained, a production treadmill; once on the treadmill, it required continued and ever more exertion to stay on, also making it difficult to get off (Anderson 2009).
By the early twenty-first century, both the farm landscape and rural society were simultaneously simpler and more complicated than they had been over the previous 200 years. They were simpler because there was less diversity in crop production, fewer farms with both crops and livestock, and fewer people and distinct communities. Yet they were also more complicated because those remaining farmers were more reliant on costly technological and scientific inputs that made farming more complex than ever, not to mention access to credit and the vagaries of markets. Family-sized units have been eclipsed, with a growing share of production controlled by a small number of entities that either contract with family farms or compete with