The Fate of Family Farming: Variations on an American Idea

by Ronald Jager

Overview

The Fate of Family Farming employs a hands-on approach, with much local New England detail, in its exploration of the history and future of American family farming as an idea and as an ongoing way of life. Early chapters situate family farming within American history, beginning with Jamestown and Plymouth, continuing with Jefferson and Emerson and others, and including the technological transformations during the twentieth century. An extended chapter deals with the idea of "agrarianism," and considers in detail the work of Louis Bromfield, Victor Hanson, and Wendell Berry. The middle section of the book opens a window on present-day farming with detailed portraits of four farms devoted, respectively, to the production of maple syrup, eggs and corn, milk, and apples. The author takes the reader to the barns and fields of these farms, introduces the farm families, helps the reader taste the syrup and corn and smell the silage and—ultimately enables others to see the economic and ecological challenges that farmers today face, and to consider their strategies for survival. In the last portion of the book the author provides a very accessible examination of the role of farm technology and global economics, including the many ironies of farming "success," followed by a chapter that balances the threat and promise of biotechnology, and a concluding analysis of the current struggle for "the soul of agriculture."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781584650270
Publisher:	University Press of New England
Publication date:	08/23/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

RONALD JAGER, formerly a professor of Philosophy at Yale University, grew up on a family farm in Michigan. He has written books on philosophy and history and numerous informal essays, and he is the author of the well-known Eighty Acres (1990) and Last House on the Road (1994). He lives with his wife in Washington, New Hampshire.

Read an Excerpt

The Fate of FAMILY FARMING

Variations on an American Idea

Chapter One

The Idea of Family Farming: Four Historical Moments

When [our ancestors] would praise a worthy man their praise took this form: "good husbandman," "good farmer"; one so praised was thought to have received the greatest commendation.... It is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected, their livelihood is most assured and is looked on with the least hostility, and those who are engaged in that pursuit are least inclined to be disaffected. -MARCUS PORCIUS CATO OF ROME, De Agricultura (circa 160 B.C.)

The eastern United States has known nearly four hundred years of farming, mostly by former Europeans, a saga that goes from Indian corn to genetically modified corn, a rich and complex narrative, with many a painful early failure and many a later ambiguous success. Long before the four centuries of European occupation, there stretches back an indefinitely long period of successful farming by Native Americans, concerning which we know very little; but what we understand very clearly is that the natives' long-established knowledge of agriculture was absolutely lifesaving for many of the innocents who first came here from abroad.

The four hundred years itself encompasses a field obviously much too large to be surveyed or summarized here, so I propose to look carefully at just four isolated but especially revealing "moments," one drawn from each of those four centuries, and each of which highlights a pivotal point in the American family farm story. They are moments that enable us to see not only the realities of farming but especially the perceptions of it.

Seventeenth Century: Beginning Failures

From a European point of view, summers along the Hudson and the Chesapeake and the Potomac were excessively hot and muggy, and winters in New England were bitter cold-extremes largely unknown in Europe. Moreover, almost the entire landscape of the New World was covered with huge trees, and among the trees might be hostile Indians, and, throughout most of New England, beneath the trees were rocks. None of this was good news for husbandry, or farming; and most of those who first came were not farmers and, in fact, did not even expect to become farmers. Not a good way to start a country.

What the early emigrants to Virginia and New England did expect is often not very clear. Very diverse groups of individuals, they came mainly from urban or village areas of England, often with fatally vague notions of gaining a livelihood from the land. They were religious dissenters, Separatists and Puritans, tradesmen, indentured servants, textile workers, ex-soldiers, soldiers of fortune, fur traders, lumbermen, adventurers, gold seekers, clergymen, jailbirds, fishermen, carpenters, plus, especially in the Virginia colony, a collection of riffraff from the London streets gathered up each year and forcibly sent to America to make money for the Virginia Company. Only here and there a farmer or a farmer's son among them.

Unfortunately for them, the earliest data available-to them or to us-too often presents the New World in a light extravagantly favorable to agriculture. For hundreds of years, Native Americans had farmed the eastern seaboard, and they had the good sense and the poor tools to farm only the best and most tillable areas, the fertile river flood plains and the seacoast flatlands. They were highly successful at what they did, resourceful in the use of natural fertilizing techniques-and remarkably effective in arranging for women to do most of the work. Surely they never, ever imagined that they might someday be overrun by a foreign race of "farmers" who would actually try to cultivate the rocky and forested uplands. And they had no way of knowing that their modest successes at farming probably overly impressed the earliest Europeans who first saw them, namely, the palefaced sailors who drifted along the coast and gawked and wondered if they were gazing upon the Garden of Eden. To these Native Americans belonged the first commodity farming in this region, and their chief commodity was corn-organic corn from heirloom seed, as it happens, carefully selected for more than a thousand years.

Earliest reports of European voyagers tell of huge cornfields, up to a hundred acres or more, throughout some of the seaboard regions, usually interplanted with squash and pumpkins. A century before the settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts, Geovanni da Verrazano enthusiastically reported a countryside "adapted to cultivation ... and of so great fertility that whatever is sown there will yield an excellent crop." Did he know what he was talking about? No one was in a position to ask. But later, Samuel de Champlain, who explored farther inland, reported "a great deal of country cleared up and planted." In 1589 the Englishman Richard Hakluyt published an account of New World travelers' reports (the book's title begins, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries, and goes on for six lines), to which he added an enthusiastic "Discourse concerning Western Planting," urging the planting of colonies in this marvelous New World. First among many reasons Hakluyt listed for colonizing New England was this: "The soyle yeldeth, and may be made to yelde, all the severall comodities of Europe, and of all kingdomes, domynions, and territories that England tradeth with." New England could be the farm for the trading empire of Old England. In fact, he foresaw a new destiny for the nation: planting colonies would produce robust adventure, create new markets, provide naval stores, supply raw materials, and so on.

The Principall Navigations was the kind of book, and appeared at such a time (the Spanish Armada had just been defeated), as was destined to make it a best-seller; and it bent the English exploratory imagination firmly toward America. It spurred the formation of London's Virginia Company and later of the Jamestown settlement in 1607. Hakluyt's book also fired up the adventurer who became the leader of the Jamestown Colony, Captain John Smith, and his book, in turn, published after he left Jamestown and focused on New England, once more turned the mind of England emphatically toward America, especially New England. In A Description of New England, published in England in 1616, Captain John Smith lavished his heaviest praise on "the Countrie of the Massachusets, which is the Paradise of all those parts. For heere are many Iles all planted with corne; groves, mulberries, salvage gardens, and good harbours." Thus was the New World-a teeming paradise where anybody could come and just harvest the garden-enthusiastically publicized in Europe. In view of the disastrous early plantation attempts, one has to suppose that far too many exaggerated reports were far too naively believed.

English settlers learned the truth the brutal way. What we know as the initial Virginia Roanoke settlement, organized by Sir Walter Raleigh, struggled, faltered, and then mysteriously and completely vanished from the earth. The next settlement, in Jamestown in 1607, was immediately another catastrophe, though it is usually called, with insufficient irony, the first "successful" colony in the New World. Beginning with 144 settlers, the group was distracted by the futile search for gold, by widespread laziness, general quarrelsomeness, and the manufacturing of pitch and tar for its London sponsors, and was reduced by desertions, by starvation, scurvy, and other disease to a mere 38 within the first year. More settlers arrived and still more sickened, starved, and died the second year, and by the third year the remnant, who had not yet learned to feed themselves, were giving up and leaving, and were stopped only by another new shipload of settlers. It was to be a pattern: new arrivals "saved" the colonists, who for a long time seemed utterly to lack the skills and ingenuity to grow and find enough food to keep themselves healthy or alive. In the first fifteen years a total of nearly 10,000 settlers came to Jamestown, many of them picked up on London streets and many of them indentured to the London Virginia Company, but by the early 1620s there were just 2,000 there. Whereupon an Indian war cost them over 300 lives in one day. An English critic was said to have remarked: "Instead of a plantacion Virginia will shortly get the name of a slaughterhouse." For nearly two decades, wars, disease, famine, and returnees took a toll of hundreds every year. The stalwart few learned slowly to forget gold and grow corn, which kept them from total starvation, and to raise tobacco, which they could not eat but which pleased the London capitalists who kept sending over new innocents. Such was the "successful" Jamestown Colony.

None of this seemed to deter John Smith (who was certainly a brave and able man, and also a colorful blowhard) from his propaganda. Although the Jamestown Colony struggled to learn even basic husbandry from the Indians, New England would be much better, he prophesied in his Description of New England (1616). Such a message played well in both England and Holland. Those we call the Pilgrims, being mostly religious Separatists (from the established Church of England) and thus by definition a contentious and independent lot, read Smith's book, read their Bibles, said good-bye to Holland, and in late July took a leaky boat to England, where they eventually were forced to abandon it. They piled the Mayflower to its gunnels with over a hundred passengers and set out for the New World in the fall and landed in New England in the winter! What could they have been thinking, to go to such a world with such preparation, and in such a season?

And what did they see when they got here? John Smith, they knew, had declared this region "the Paradise of all those parts" with "Iles all planted with corne" and with "gardens, and good harbours." Perhaps they would just harvest the garden. William Bradford, in his later history of the colony, wrote of their landing: "What could they see but a hideous & desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts & wild men?" He continued: "For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a wetherbeaten face; and the whole countrie, full of woods & thickets, represented a wild & savage heiw." Some paradise.

As with the Jamestown Colony there were few farmers on this boat, no farming knowledge of the New World, and little farm equipment. Presumably, no one brings a plow to Paradise. As at Jamestown many, many suffered and died that first winter, more than half of them. Perhaps all would have died if they had not been extremely fortunate to find caches of Indian corn and beans that kept them alive and supplied them with seed for the next summer. Bradford admits: "[H]ere they got seed to plant them corn the next year, or else they might have starved, for they had none, nor any likelihood to get any." In the spring the Indians offered them cleared land for use and gave them more corn for seed. And Squanto, the English-speaking Indian, taught them how to plant corn, bless or fertilize it with fish, and intersperse it with peas, squash, and pumpkins-niche farming, so to speak. Even their own seeds failed them in this paradise: "Some English seed they sew, as wheat & pease, but it came not to good, either by badnes of the seed or latenes of the season, or both, or some other defecte." Without Squanto's help it would certainly have been an even worse disaster, like the first Jamestown years. Instead, we got Thanksgiving Day. But the next year was nearly as bad as the first. We celebrate the Pilgrims' tough survivalism, which is real enough, and we pity them for their suffering, which was terrible, and we politely overlook their considerable follies. But competent husbandmen they certainly were not.

Our familiar and textbook understanding of the Jamestown and Plymouth Colonies ought to include the forthright admission that they constitute thoroughly tragic and embarrassing beginnings for a nation that was eventually to pride itself on its farming traditions. The first hard and bitter lesson the Plymouth settlers had to learn was that farming in this brave new world would be absolutely essential and would not be easy at all; and in New England it would be harder, and in the winter, not possible at all. They might have figured that out before setting sail, and done more preparing, but we have no evidence that they did. Indeed, such was their wisdom about country living that it would be twelve years before they had a plow in Plymouth.

A second lesson too they had to learn at Plymouth, and this was a more subtle one, namely, that independent family farms would be more effective than the communal farming over which they struggled and quarreled for the first year. In the second and third years land was leased to individuals by lot, and on a one-year basis, but by the fourth year they had figured out that effective individual ownership was essential to success. Bradford tells us that individuals "made suite to the governor to have some portion of land given them for continuance, and not by yearly lotte." Under the lease and lot system "that which the more industrious had brought into good culture (by much pains) one year, came to leave it the nexte, and often another might injoye it; so as the dressing of their lands were the more slighted over, & to lese profite." Thus, by an appropriate accounting-though not commonly reckoned as such in the history books-the owner-operated American farm was, in effect, invented at Plymouth in 1624, and so authorized by Governor William Bradford. Three years later, with "the division of cattle," they took the further step of creating private ownership of livestock. Later, the Plymouth Company, which had initially sponsored the venture and to which some of the colonists had been indentured, sold out to the colonists themselves, thus confirming their ownership of the farms. Meanwhile, in Jamestown, free land for tobacco growing was being offered to settlers. In short, American husbandry was being invented, step by step, from the meanest scratch imaginable.

Unfortunately, early stages of other New World settlements followed again the melancholy pattern of early Jamestown and Plymouth: terrible hardships were endemic, while the settlers struggled desperately, with multiple deaths on every side, learning how to find and raise food. A settlement in the Massachusetts Bay at present-day Weymouth failed utterly in the 1620s, "the most of them dying and languishing away," the survivors being rescued from starvation and attacking Indians by the Plymouth Colony.

Continues...

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Table of Contents

TRADITIONS • The Idea of Family Farming: Four Historical Moments • Farming in New Hampshire • Agrarianism: Three Defining Voices • FOUR FARMS • Maple: The Sweet Good-bye of Winter at Bascom's • Got Milk? Eccardt Farm, Inc. • Cornucopia: Eggs and Corn at the Coll Farm • Apples: The Glow of Autumn at Gould Hill • PROSPECTS • The Ironies of Success • Biotechnology and the Future • The Soul of Agriculture

Editorial Reviews

"This is an ambitious work with a moral imperative . . . Jager is efficient and entertaining while giving us the context for the news . . . The Fate of Family Farming is sweetly moving; you really do end up understanding why it matters."—New York Times Book Review


"Jager's readable study provides an excellent background for anyone concerned about the future of agriculture and food in this country. Recommended for both public and academic libraries."—Library Journal


"The Fate of Family Farming lives up to its title by offering not only an in-depth portrait of the American farm today but also well-reasoned projections from the American farm of the future, for good or for ill. Very highly recommended reading for anyone concerned with the seeming demise of the American family farm in the face of the global phenomena of agribusiness."—The Midwest Book Review


"[A] lively and readable book that includes insights into classical mythology, contemporary agrarian literature, case studies of "niche farming," and a penetrating analysis of agribusiness that will deeply disturb the reader, even if there are some hopeful signs of change . . . It would be hard to find anything comparable to his small volume even in an edited anthology on farming."—Virginia Quarterly Review

From the Publisher

For a book that doesn't venture more than a couple of hundred miles from the writer's home in New Hampshire, The Fate of Family Farming covers a lot of ground. This is an ambitious work with a moral imperative. Jager lets the agrarian writer Louis Bromfield state it: the farmer is ''the fundamental citizen of any community, state or nation.''
— The New York Times

Dominique Browning

A former Yale philosophy professor, Jager is the author of Eighty Acres and Last House on the Road, which considered, respectively, the author's experiences growing up on a small Michigan farm and rural life in New Hampshire (where he and his wife now live). Jager's new book takes a look at the past, present, and future of the American family farm. Part 1 examines the history (of ideas as well as practices) of family farming from this country's earliest times. There is a fascinating account of the ups and downs of farming in New Hampshire over the centuries and a discussion of the ideas of some important 20th-century agrarian thinkers, including Wendell Berry and Louis Bromfield. Part 2 focuses on four New Hampshire farm families and their present-day operations, including their challenges, successes, and aspirations. Finally, in Part 3, Jager examines future prospects in a world of agribusiness conglomerates, globalization, biotechnology, and cheap food. He believes that modern movements such as sustainable agriculture, niche farming, and farmers' markets hold some hope for small farmers. Jager's readable study provides an excellent background for anyone concerned about the future of agriculture and food in this country. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.-William H. Wiese, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal