A Companion to American Agricultural History - Группа авторов

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farmers had to mount a steep learning curve, balancing feed grains and cash grains, laying aside soft white wheats, and embracing hard red winter wheats of Russian derivation. A similar process of adjustment on the northern plains led to cultivation of hard red spring wheats ultimately also of Russian origin, but it was in the north there emerged the other fundamental adjustment, that of tillage. Dry farming—a term that comprised not just farming without irrigation, but also a complex of tillage practices intended to make the most of meager rainfall in a semiarid land—required first a realistic reckoning of the land. Deep plowing, fallowing, and maintenance of a dust mulch through frequent use of spike or disc harrows were intended to husband moisture and raise a crop every other year where moisture would not sustain one every year (Hargreaves 1957). No chronicler of agricultural settlement synthesizes the hopes, failures, triumphs, and adjustments of nineteenth-century pioneers better than Craig Miner, the historian of western Kansas (Miner 1986). Learning to navigate agriculture “as a commercial enterprise and at the same time as a way of life,” Miner says farmers learned “the dynamics of total human experience.” Miner thus is a more poetic echo of Fite.

      The traditional historical conception of the frontier as a nineteenth-century affair resulted in a long-standing neglect by scholars of continuing agricultural settlement in the twentieth century, a shortcoming best remedied by the historian of West River South Dakota, Paula M. Nelson (Nelson 1986). Her account of agricultural settlement west of the Missouri River, with its initial efflorescence followed by disillusionment, resonates with (and even directly quotes) the traditional ballad of prairie settlers, “Dakota Land” (also known as “Kansas Land,” “Nebraska Land,” and other variants), alternating stanzas lauding a “land of corn and wheat” with stanzas damning a “land of drouth and heat.”

      Thus from the settlement experience the denizens of the plains (and their historians) carry a historical mixed memory. They took up the land with high hopes of fulfilling the grand promises of land promoters (Blodgett 1988). Those promises never quite went away; as David M. Wrobel has shown, they formed a residual base for memory and identity (Wrobel 2002). They survived in tension with experiences of severe historical trauma—deadly prairies fires, destructive plagues of Rocky Mountain locusts (Atkins 1984; Lockwood 2004; Courtwright 2011). Such layered experiences, combined with day-to-day learning and adjustment, brought them to the page on which historians such as Fite, Miner, and Nelson have situated them.

      The commodity cultures of the Great Plains, many and diverse, generally have not attracted historical attention matching that of the cattle culture. The cotton industry so important to the southern plains is a relatively recent relocation. At the other end of the plains, an oral history of the sugar beet industry in the Red River Valley of the North (Shoptaugh 1997) shows the rich potential for work focused on a commodity and its producers. The only commodity culture to receive sustained attention, however, is that of wheat, beginning with the masterly work of Malin (Malin 1944). Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas is the keystone of a massive and sustained inquiry by this irascible scholar into the emergence of communities of production, work which, although clearly derivative from the sort of environmental determinism broadly sketched by Webb, reckons with complexity in admirable fashion. Malin, first, grounds his work in place—the vernacular region of the central plains known as the Golden Belt for its grain production. Second, he makes its “point of approach” the “community or neighborhood,” thus recognizing that in the nineteenth century, agricultural development and dissemination was a neighborly process. At the same time, the work has international reach; in particular, Malin assembles the threads by which German–Russian Mennonites established the culture of hard red winter wheats from Russia on the plains (Moon 2020). His attention to this crucial introduction also exemplifies his critical posture, for Malin challenges Mennonite folk mythology as to Turkey wheat even while validating its importance. Throughout, Malin’s work is granular, inductive, piecing together amazing amounts of data. Perhaps most important, Malin portrays his farmers as learning communities with agency, people on the land assessing circumstances, making decisions, taking actions—shifting their crops and varieties, inventing technologies to solve problems, all the while talking among themselves about what they are doing.

      Two works on the culture of wheat harvesting extend the concept of a commodity culture on the plains to its logical limits. Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs (Isern 1990) deals with the vainglorious era of steam-powered threshing in a way that delineates the economic and social systems by which work was accomplished (the organization of custom threshing and threshing rings, the recruitment of harvest labor, adoption of new technologies of mechanization) while at the same time also zooming in on folk practices (how to build a shock of grain, how to manage a cook car, what the whistle-signals blown by a steam traction engineer meant to the people in the field). Both the systems and the folkways of wheat culture here described loom large because they crested during the so-called Golden Age of American Agriculture. Another work (Isern 1981) takes up the story of wheat harvesting with the advent of itinerant custom harvesting during the World War II era. The author emphasizes the regional suitability of custom harvesting, whereby agricultural contractors (themselves farmers) package and transport the capital and labor requirements of harvest for farmers, as well as the role of custom harvesting as a connecting link of agricultural operations up and down the plains, Texas to Saskatchewan. He also, however, develops the self-consciousness and community—the mentalité, one might say—among the custom cutters, a tight subculture.

      The history of agricultural research and technology on the Great Plains suffers in the telling from the limitations of regionalism. Knowledge systems are either federal (governmental operations comprising national and state entities) or global (economic operations that transgress boundaries). For instance, the work of historian Alan I. Marcus on the origins of experiment stations as organs of agricultural colleges under the Hatch Act of 1887 (Marcus 1986), a work of national scope, establishes a template for thinking about public research on agriculture. Interpretation of the subject highlights tension between farmers, even scientific farmers, and agricultural scientists, over the research agenda. There was a growing sense that to improve an agriculture that was elevating in expectations and practice, scientists might have to loosen their ties to farmers at the grassroots and elevate the profession of agricultural science. The scientists prevailed; experiment stations became “part of the new network for creating and disseminating agricultural information”—a network embracing rationalization, systematization, and standardization. Agricultural science became less about solving farmers’ problems and more about transforming farmers’ practices—and lives.

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