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This chapter considers the emergence of large-scale farms, which were the most visible example of the changes in the first decade of the twentieth century. Not all such farms were industrial in exactly the same way, but all were considered unusual for their grasp of modern techniques and approaches to production. A number of the large-scale farms emerging in the 1920s offered themselves as spectacles to the curious, and seemed amazing to many for their size, for the number of livestock all in one place, or for the machine-like efficiency with which work was done. The chapter shows that during the 1920s, industrial farming concepts found their way onto real farms in America. It also reveals that the principles of efficiency, managerial oversight and planning, reliance on experts, mechanization, and large-scale operations moved from classrooms, lecture halls, and federal agencies to the rural countryside.

This chapter introduces twentieth-century agriculture and the “farm crises” of the 1920s and 1980s. In the mid-1980s, a disturbing phenomenon began occurring in rural America. In the preceding decade, farm advisers and agricultural business dealers counseled many families to enlarge their farms, increase their herds, and purchase bigger, more sophisticated machinery so that they could take advantage of an exploding world market for American farm products. After a few years, however, market slowdowns became contractions, and many families ultimately found themselves unable to sell all that they had produced on the farm, at any price. The chapter examines this “farm crisis,” which was devastating to many families who had long prided themselves on their conservative business dealings and good judgment. It reveals that the “farm crisis” of the 1980s seemed to echo an earlier collapse, the farm crisis of the 1920s.

This book focuses on the cooperation between scientists and agricultural growers over solving problems associated with building California’s farm industry. The use of methods such as participant-observation fieldwork, semistructured interviews, and analysis of historical documents for understanding the importance of the interrelationship between science and industrial agriculture is discussed. Changes in the U.S. agriculture agrarian ideal, with respect to industrialization and social change during the nineteenth century, are explored. Cooperative Extension history, in the context of the U.S., California, and the Salinas Valley, is discussed along with the response of growers and advisors at the time of the farm labor crisis during World War II. The book presents information on the use of field trials by farm advisors to collect data on new farm practices.

Over a long career, New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen became the poet of the working poor, just as Indiana’s John Mellencamp became the voice of embattled farm families and Bob Seger the rock ‘n’ roll bard of the Midwest. Springsteen’s stature became such that, against his own intentions, his appeal was invoked by Republican conservatives during the transformative Reagan era. The success of these artists, singing about the hopes and fears of ordinary citizens whose communities and livelihoods were besieged by globalization, was directly tied to the sweeping shifts of labor and governance that affected the industrialized world in the 1980s.

Modern American food aid cannot be understood without understanding the plight of the rural farmer between the two world wars. At the end of World War I, these farmers, responding to Hoover’s call to “plow to the fences,” were suddenly producing far too much for a world rapidly returning to peacetime. Farmers had bought additional land on credit. Now they lacked sufficient income to make payment of the loans. Defaults mounted; rural banks padlocked their doors by the thousands. Presidents Coolidge and Hoover sought private rather than public remedies, but without success. Bills sent to the White House to provide relief to farmers were vetoed. When Roosevelt arrived in the White House, millions of tons of grain were rotting in storage across the country because consumers were too poor to pay enough for basic foodstuffs to enable farmers to earn enough to survive.