Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture

by Deborah Fitzgerald

During the early decades of the twentieth century, agricultural practice in America was transformed from a pre-industrial to an industrial activity. In this book Deborah Fitzgerald argues that farms became modernized in the 1920s because they adopted not only new machinery but also the financial, cultural, and ideological apparatus of industrialism. Fitzgerald examines how bankers and emerging professionals in engineering and economics pushed for systematic, businesslike farming. She discusses how factory practices served as a template for the creation across the country of industrial or corporate farms. She looks at how farming was affected by this revolution and concludes by following several agricultural enthusiasts to the Soviet Union, where the lessons of industrial farming were studied.

Genres: History, Agriculture, Food, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 8, 2003

Reviews

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exceptionally thorough and well researched book on the beginnings of agricultural industrialisation. Final chapter ‘Collectivisation and Industrialisation’ about american intervention at Verblud was super interesting.

Certainly not a gripping book by any means—Fitzgerald prioritises information density over narrative and thesis. But I really enjoyed parts of it and would recommend to nerds.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fitzgerald makes an important contribution to agricultural history when she looks at the logic of industrialization--who thought it was a good idea, who implemented aspects of it into rural America, how farmers received or rejected these changes, and under what parameters that logic was extended to other parts of the globe. She locates this transition primarily in the 1920s, as her so-called "agents of industrialization", primarily agricultural economists, industrial technology developers, agricultural engineers, and Taylorite management/efficiency experts, spread their authority into rural landscapes looking to make farms as predictable, efficient, and modern as the factories in urban centers. Her six chapters move through this labor in breathtaking detail, and can feel highly overwhelming as she cites the contrasting priorities of agricultural economists versus farm management people became fraught with suspicion, as competing government agencies sought to impose their own goals into the working agenda of the new farms. This becomes much earlier in her case study chapter on the Campbell Farm in Montana, where we can actually see those various logics put to work in a "typical farm landscape." Perhaps against her own ambitions, I found the chapter on extending American industrial agriculture to Soviet landscapes especially fascinating, as it exposes the contrasts between the moral ideals of American versus Soviet farmers of the era. I do also wonder why there isn't more primary material from the farmers, recounting how they felt about the process of learning how to drive a tractor, keep standard inventories of planting and yield, how to expand their farm's footprints, and lose a degree of control over what they grew and when (and paid money to do so). Was it that farmers did not speak their minds in formal trade journals or correspondence? Or is this one of the ways that the social history inherent to this period is missing from Fitzgerald's perspective?

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea of abundance drove the development of agriculture during the period following the First World War into the New Deal. Fitzgerald sees this progressive idea as an industrial logic used to create agricultural efficiency. The modernization of the small farm was born from a scientific management system designed to increase the efficiency already present in manufacturing. Experts and technology developed over time to drive modernization, cutting labor costs and significantly increasing farm yield. The government was supremely supportive and created assistance programs and centers of learning to increase the velocity of agricultural modernization. By 1927, M.L. Wilson, an important agricultural economist, listed eight essential principles of modern farming, starting with a minimum viable farm acreage, and ending with the statement, “…the family-unit farm must pass out of the picture.” By 1929, one purchase of ten harvesters worked 24 hours a day for six weeks without a breakdown. These continued advances created normative social pressure to industrialize small farms. Nevertheless, the boom-and-bust agricultural cycle led many small farmers into bankruptcy while their larger cousins were able to weather the downturns. The impact was an abundance of foodstuffs, increased food variety, a lower workload, and a higher standard of living for farmers. The downside saw distribution problems from overproduction, issues with food safety, a reduction of farm families, and migration from rural to urban areas. Fitzgerald does not lament the downsides but asserts that they were not enviable. Perhaps true. Still, it is difficult to imagine increased agricultural efficiency without a reduction of labor which would result in the dislocation of farmworkers and the demise of the small family farm.

[CL Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you look for a swift & decisive answer for why American agriculture industrialized, you would be disappointed. This book is more about an ambivalent era in which much anxiety surfaced in opinions about the mechanization of farm (both for it & against it).

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

I asked my students to compare the depiction of the countryside to the depiction of the city in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle . One particularly astute student told me that it seemed like the conditions described in Sinclair’s slaughterhouses mirrored the conditions Steinbeck describes in agricultural fields. In the 30 some years between the books Steinbeck's farms looks more like Sinclair’s city than Sinclair’s countryside. In some ways, the industrial changes my student noticed are real. Industrialization transformed agriculture during 1918-1930, the period Fitzgerald describes in depth.


What I appreciate most about Fitzgerald’s book is her insistence on the diversity of farm regions and farm experiences in the United States. This variation was one of the major challenges of industrialized agriculture. Industrial agriculture was not a set of coincidences, a series of mechanisms working in concert, but an ideal consciously chased after with at times devastated effects. Fitzgerald examines the rise of experts, agricultural schools, farm management, and agricultural economists. She also examines the impact and influence of WWI.


The most interesting (new to me) part of the book was the discussion of the exchanges between US agrarian experts and the USSR. As Fitzgerald writes, “In spite of the brief amount of time these agriculturalist spent in the Soviet Union and despite their collective lack of influence in world affairs their experiences had a powerful effect on American agriculture in the 1930s. This was not because these men were politically sympathetic to the Soviets or because they were enamored of the of the Soviet way of life or even, as Lewis Feurer so persuasively argued about the New Dealers, because agriculturalists were inspired by the notion of central, social planning. Rather, it was because the Soviet plan to grow wheat on an industrial scale and in an industrial fashion was similar to American ideas about the direction American agriculture should take” (158).


I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of agriculture in the United States. I would also recommend this book to read alongside William Conlogue’s Working the Garden . It also, unsurprisingly, pairs well with McWilliams’s Factories in the Field providing a national perspective on his Californian narrative.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a successful environmental history book due to its narrow focus (12 years on a Montana farm) pinpointing an agricultural practice in America that transformed farming from a pre-industrial to an industrial activity. Deborah Fitzgerald demonstrates how the adoption of new machinery as well as the financial, cultural, and ideological apparatus developed during the industrial revolution in product manufacturing allowed farms to modernize during the 1920s. Fitzgerald examines how business leaders, agricultural college professors, and bankers--adopting a new industrial logic--brought about a systematic, businesslike farming operation in America. Factory practices served as a template for the creation across the country of industrial, corporate farms that were then juxtaposes them with the Russian revolution and ensuing Soviet Union practices. This is a clever book with a clever title.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good like Osha Gray Davidson and James Scott.