I just realized that Sarah Taber has a podcast, called Farm to Taber, which will be feeding into her forthcoming book of the same name. The episode I heard about is part I of the history of American agriculture.
I read a transcript of it here. I took some notes for my own use, and I'm putting them here.
Getting Started
We all have absorbed a conventional story about agriculture, which Taber says comes from some combination of Little House on the Prairie, Wendell Berry, and most recently Michael Pollan. "It was all great until agribusiness just came out of nowhere and swallowed it all up and forced people to behave in a certain way." But no.
The untruths start from the fact that it all took place on stolen land. Then there's the idea that the North was a lot better than the South, when slavery in the North was not abolished until the 1830s or even the 1840s because of "grandfather" clauses.
There are three bases to conventional thinking about the conversion to agribusiness:
- Farmers are good; they were victims.
- Consumers were at fault; they wanted cheap food.
- Everyone is now unhealthy because of bad diets from cheap food; we made poor choices.
The narrative of framing farmers as good and people in cities as bad is very old in the U.S. It goes back to our founding.
The idea that consumers want convenient food is never examined. There is more need for convenience when people are squeezed, with the need to work long hours at jobs that have paid less relative to increased core costs like housing and increased transportation costs. Cooking from scratch, the cheapest way to eat, takes the most time.
It's noteworthy that the early 20th century was the time the U.S. lost a stable carbohydrate supply when the American chestnut was destroyed by disease. Nuts from these trees were readily available in much of the eastern U.S. and were used by working class and poor people for food that was not controlled by agriculture or business.
Taber is based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and has a Ph.D. in crop health. She has been a farm worker and consultant on crop science, food handling, and farm operations. As her guest on the podcast says, "her work as a literary scholar is focused on the history of Appalachia and the construction of this Appalachian identity."
Taber says about Appalachia:
It's Cloud Forest. If it were any other country...we would call it Cloud Forest.... It's the center of biological diversity for so much of the eastern U.S.
[About the West Virginia area:] it's funny because they keep talking about like, oh, it's not good for agriculture up there. I'm like, ah, it's not good for plantation agriculture. It's not good for cotton, tobacco, and rice. It's great for forestry, orchards, dairy, vegetables, because it's higher up in the mountains and it's cool. You can grow things up there like cherries and cabbage during different times of year, or just that you can never grow them out close to the coast. So it's a really good opportunity to do a regional food system that's very diversified because you have subtropical and tropical lowlands right next to these cooler mountains. That's a lot of what makes Chile such an amazing agricultural export region.
And in the U.S. instead, we blow the mountain tops off and make it a desecrated place.
A History of Excuses
In the Northeastern U.S., just after the revolution, there was the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791, which I've mentioned before. Borderland farmers in western Pennsylvania were making a value-added product from their corn that could be shipped more easily so they could compete with farmers who were closer to market. Then a tax was imposed on whiskey to help repay the war debt, and they were not happy and revolted.
Taber asked, But why were they making whiskey specifically? There are other value-added products, like feed the corn to pigs and make salt pork, or feed it to to cattle, which could have been moved on the hoof. Why are a bunch of homesteading, self-sufficient family farmers all dependent on one cash crop? That doesn't make sense.
Well, it turns out 1791 was the same time as the Haitian Revolution. Haiti, when it was a French colony, with its big sugar depots exporting sugar, was the U.S.'s #1 trading partner. It was France's richest colony.
Generally, there was a lot of two-way trade between the U.S. and the Caribbean. The U.S. sent timber and food, like dried fish and salt pork (shelf-stable protein / processed food). Many of the commodities that were sent from farmers to the coastal U.S. markets were being shipped to slave colonies in the Caribbean (wheat and live cattle, too, which were slaughtered when they arrived at their destinations). "They were all cash crop export depots for Haiti and to a lesser extent other Caribbean sugar islands."
Then the Haitian revolution happened and stopped that trade. The formerly enslaved Haitian people knew how to grow their own manioc, bananas, plantains. Without having to grow sugar, the import market collapsed.
That's why the western Pennsylvania farmers were suddenly so dependent on whiskey for their living: their normal export market had collapsed. There was a domestic market for whiskey in the U.S.
Taber connects this with larger issues of land acquisition and management:
Nobody was forced to go out there [western Pennsylvania]. I think a lot of what happened was... I wanna get on the property ladder. That's why we need to go genocide some indigenous people so we can take their land. Cuz I want get on the property ladder. And once you're out there, just like today and like for the last 5,000 years, the easiest way to monetize a remote property is grow grain.... Because it's fungible. There's so many things you can do with it.... it's the dead ass easiest way to monetize a remote property.
So when we have this idea that everything used to be self-sufficient and the food system used to be good and nobody ate cheap, bulk convenience food.... Cheap, disgusting bulk rations for very poor and exploited people and huge markets built to create those cheap bulk rations... are the most American food system.
Little House on the Prairie gave us a false example cuz it's written by a child who had no idea how real estate deals worked at the time.
At this point she describes the differentiation of gentlemen farmers and subsistence farmers in the North. Gentlemen farmers were actually lawyers, merchants, or tavern owners. They had an outside cash stream. They made their farms look like a little version of England, "erasing all traces of indigenous presence." They kept their farms for a long time, handing them down through generations, because they didn't need to make money. They were Whig farmers.
They wanted to keep wages down, and cut down the trees to sell the timber, slashed and burned to sell the ashes as fertilizer in England. Eventually they sold off some of the land to more gentlemen farmers.
The pattern: Acquire big tracts, sack them of natural resources, and then flip the remaining parts.
The people running the country hated homesteading, which is why it took so long for it to become law (around the time of the Civil War). They didn't want the masses of people to dissipate away from the East because it would drive wages up by decreasing the available labor force.
Sharecropping and feudalism
Sharecropping started in the North after slavery was finally abolished in the first half of the 19th century. "...if you look at organic farmers today, waxing rhapsodic about the virtues of manure, that's actually tapping into a hundred years old tradition, cuz manure is very labor-intensive to haul around, especially for how much nutrient it contains."
Part of the reason people wanted to move west was to get away from the depressed wages in the east, paid by established farmers. "There would have been far less pressure to genocide indigenous people if [eastern gentlemen farmers] had just paid a living wage.... the United States has never had a culture of responsible business ownership that can support human life."
Feudalism was legal in New York State until 1845. At this point, the Dutch and the patroons came up in the discussion (those relatives of David Crosby). Alexander Hamilton wrote the contracts for his in-laws the Schuylers, which converted their feudal peasant leases into sales contracts that never managed to come to completion. This made the contracts technically legal, even though the peasants still had to keep paying the Schuylers every year, and if the peasants wanted to leave they had to pay "quit rent." Great job, Alexander!
Those contracts lasted until the 1840s, when the Anti-Rent War happened in the Albany area, which ended with New York having a state constitutional convention to outlaw feudalism—finally.
Another thing the rich people were worried about was poor whites and enslaved people running off and joining indigenous communities. Can't lose that labor and cannon fodder!
The idea that indigenous people were not a force to be reckoned with, that guns, germs, and steel did the whole thing is wrong. "That's why expansion into the West was kind of slow for a long time. After smallpox, a lot of communities rebuilt.... That's why when the U.S. invaded, a lot of what they did was destroy food systems. Because then people can't come back."
Gentlemen farmers "had a word for all the people who weren't themselves...everyone else is a skimmer." (That makes me think of today's "makers and takers" terminology, used by the Right.) The gentleman farmers stayed in the same place. Others slashed and burned and moved on, so that's what skimming was.
Skimmers included a lot of plantation owners, though not ones like Jefferson who wanted to run for office and needed a permanent address. "Most of the people who actually owned slave plantations...were very mobile. They'd stay in a place for like 3, 5, 7, maybe 10 years, burn it, move on." There was a very high death rate for the enslaved people. "Liquidate everything, move on."
Gentlemen farmers up North referred to squatters who operated on a "small family basis and slave plantation owners as the same kind of farming." They didn't see the economics behind it, or care that their own actions were subsidized.
Pellagra and the System of Cheap Food
I've talked about the pellagra outbreak in the U.S. before, thanks to Taber.
Between 1900 and 1940, mostly in the South, poor people were eating a diet made up almost entirely of unprocessed corn, salt pork (fatback), and molasses.
Post-Civil War, land ownership records in the 1870 and 1880 censuses in the South indicate Black people claiming 20 and 40 acres in many places, with white people disputing it. Not long after, some Black people moved to places like Kansas, and towns passed "sundown town" laws, not wanting labor competition from people who knew how to farm "big acreage, cash crops, and also knew how to grow subsistence gardens for [their] own use... Very competent farmers, white folks up North didn't want the competition.... It wasn't just racism, it was also fear of being caught by your own incompetence."
So most Black people had to stay in the South. Big landowners didn't want to let people work for wages, because then they could strike when it was harvest time and the owner was vulnerable. So they brought in the sharecropping idea from the North. And allowed growing only non-edible crops like cotton, forbidding their sharecroppers to grow anything else, even though they had done that pre-war. Cotton prices crashed as the market was flooded with so much more cotton.
Taber has harsh words for landed gentry and their love of pastoralism, anti-industrialism. This is where Wendell Berry comes in. They say, "we don't worry about money and we live close to the earth, which was just exploiting humans directly instead of using cash to do it."
She doesn't like the term "wage slavery" because Southern gentry use it to deflect from what they do.
The reason pellagra took off in 1900, even though the same three-part cheap food system had preexisted that date, is because that's when a machine called Beall's corn degerminator was introduced into the system. Corn had previously been grown in the South along with cotton, but after the Civil War, it was bought in from the North. (Side note: "40% of the "small family farms" in Iowa were sharecroppers and tenants.") The corn was shipped down the Mississippi. Taber found testimony from 1917 about how much South Carolina imported that year from the Midwest, and — adjusting for inflation and extrapolation to the rest of the South — it would be about $20 billion-worth a year today. A "fire hose of money coming in for 20 years."
Beall's corn degerminator made the corn more shelf-stable (because it removed the oils). Then the remaining kernels were ground to become more compact and put into sacks for shipping. All the sharecroppers needed to do was boil it, so it was faster and they could work more hours. Perfect! But degerminating also removed the niacin.... leading to pellagra.
"Poverty at this time was not just about poverty, it was, you were basically being kept in captivity. Sharecroppers are being kept captive and fed rations basically chosen by their captors. ...kids in residential schools, a lot of prison inmates, and asylum inmates were getting pellagra for the same reason."
How It Could Have Been Different
Taber says the South could have made a lot more money growing produce, but the landowners were too busy "playing cotton games." That's why all the produce now comes from California. "It was like literally easier to build railroads across the fucking continent and irrigate California than it was to get cotton lords to change their business model."
...these fuckheads were too busy clogging up the land with cotton specifically to starve people and keep them subjugated to grow vegetables. ....the problem with produce is, you can make a decent amount of money on a small amount of land. And so if your economy is based on doling out land to white people to support a certain kind of political and economic ecosystem, allowing people to make money growing vegetables on small plots of land upends that whole thing. It allows for upper mobility on small plots of land. We can't let that happen.
When the USDA values big field crops over fruits and vegetables and calls them specialty crops... "it's literally because of racism."
It's one of the reasons the South is so broke today. "We are dedicated to growing low-revenue crops to keep people poor."
One of the things I look forward to in Taber's book is what solutions she suggests for farming.
...the take-home message about this for me is, if we're going to make agriculture sustainable and good and just, it is not gonna be by winding back the clock to something that we used to do. It is gonna be by doing things we've never done before. We're gonna have to come up with some new ideas. Cuz none of this stuff in the past is any good.
The next part of the podcast series will look at agriculture in the Midwest.
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