Chapter 6: The Wine of Wrath

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INTRODUCTION - Wine of Wrath

Sarah Mock: 13 years after John Steinbeck published his literary classic The Grapes of Wrath, he sat for an interview to update the story. He did this in part because– though Grapes of Wrath is a work of fiction, the story was not crafted from whole cloth. It was partially gleaned from the dispossessed farmers he met from Arkansas and Oklahoma who fled economic depression and blinding dust storms in the 1930s.

After the novel’s publication, Steinbeck revisited the region and attempted to reconnect with the so-called Harvest Gypsies that inspired his characters. And his readers were hungry for an epilogue– where, and how, were these people now? The interviewer asked him one question that I found particularly striking.

John Steinbeck Interviewer: The people who left and as you say, went to California looking for a living, seemed to take with them a kind of a hate and loathing for the land, which was probably understandable in terms of what the land had done to them through this calamity. Do you find when you went back through that part of the central part of the country, that there was a different attitude on the part of the people toward the land that provided their living? 

JS: The word hatred I find a little strong. They had not so much a loathing as they had a feeling of sorrow that they’d been let down by the one thing they depended on. They never lost a feeling for land as such. They may have gained a kind of a distrust for that particular land.

SM: I don’t want to spoil the story here, for anyone who hasn’t read it in the last 100 years, but what Steinbeck is talking about– this feeling for land– is one of the propulsive forces of the story’s central Joad Family. They’re forced from their homestead land in Oklahoma at the height of the Great Depression by a combination of failing crops, unpayable mortgages, and the dehumanizing pressure of technological progress. That pushed the Joad’s with thousands of other destitute farmers towards California– the land of supposedly bountiful work, milking cows and picking oranges.

But despite the tough conditions on the plains, the Joads are not happy to leave. Steinbeck’s tenant man cries, “But it’s our land…Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours.” What makes it theirs– “being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.” But nice as this sentiment is, it has no power to resist the bank, the sheriff, or worst of all, the inhuman tractors owned by distant, faceless, moneyed men from coming, as Steinbeck says, like “insects,” like locusts. With the driver not looking like a man, but “like a robot in the seat.”

This driver, a disposable part to the powers that be, “could not see the land as it was, could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth.” “He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land… The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.”

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

The Grapes of Wrath, first published in 1939, captured the story of one family, and a nation, beset by a plague of crises. Environmental crises, economic crises, war and political crises, an onslaught that left ordinary Americans feeling lonely, desperate, and unmoored from the ideas, and the places, they thought they knew. Radical agrarian activism was all but forgotten by this time, overwhelmed by the dawning of a new world where people, farmers and workers of all stripes, were being rendered obsolete by technology.

In many ways, this moment was a tipping point, when every aspect of American agriculture seemed to be buckling under the weight of flawed stewardship– including the land itself, and in the face of this onslaught, the federal government stepped into the fray on a scale never before seen, and with decidedly mixed results.

Today we’re going to take a second look at this prophetic past, at the Dust Bowl, the worst manmade environmental disaster in history, at the Great Depression that lasted twice as long for farmers as for anyone else, and at the Farm Bills fashioned to rescue farmers and their families from this oblivion. On the heels of this came the Second World War, during which America’s farmers turned an arsenal of swords to plowshares, and remade the American landscape in the process.

The changes made to American agriculture during the 1930s and 40s, especially those changes wrought by federal farm policy, redefined the ways that farmers and the American public understood and related to farmland. And they continue to shape the way we deal with agricultural spaces today. It’s a story about the successes and failures of our imperfect democratic system, and the ways we do (and don’t) deal with them, reactions that at times made the good great, and at other times made the bad worse.

This is The Only Thing That Lasts. I’m Sarah Mock.

PART 1: Disaster

SM: If you are anything like me, the Dust Bowl is one of those historical events that you technically know about– but also, you don’t really. The cliff note version then– the Dust Bowl was a decade of wind erosion-fueled dust storms in the 1930s, caused by drought and fed by exhaustive farming practices. It sent clouds of topsoil into the air thick enough to blot out the sun for miles. It was a grim enough period that Dorothy needed a concussion to see Technicolor– because the only color they had back in Kansas was brown.

The stories of human suffering during the Dust Bowl are as many and varied as the millions of people who experienced it– from the houses, cars, and bodies sandblasted– left paintless or burned, to the children who died from dust pneumonia, to the terror people felt everyday as two hundred-mile wide mountains of dust- black blizzards, they were called- engulfed their whole world.

For many who lived it, this era felt like the end was nigh, so when we talk about the Dust Bowl, it can sound like it was an act of God, wholly unpredictable. Like our agricultural worldview didn’t yet include the possibility of devastating wind erosion, or the possibility that these conditions might strike the Great Plains. That is not accurate. The problem wasn’t that we didn’t know about the deadly combination of wind and drought. The problem was, scientists thought they’d uncovered a kind of agricultural cheat code that would save us.

Gary Libecap: You had this idea, rain follows the plow, how wonderful is that. You can actually cultivate your way to more soil moisture. 

SM: That’s Gary Libecap, a professor emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What he’s referencing here– the idea that rain follows the plow– suggested that as people settle the Great Plains, plow the soil and continue to cultivate it, farmers could essentially re-engineer the local climate. Agricultural production itself, the theory went, would affect the flow of moisture in the soil and lead over time to adequate rainfall.

This theory became a key assumption in the late homestead era, when the plains of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and points West were all that was left to be distributed and settled. The U.S. government continued to give away the same small allotments that were considered just big enough to survive on in the much wetter Midwest, and the “rain follows the plow” mantra helped them justify this.

What those who advanced this notion seemed to lack was real familiarity with the land they planned to “re-engineer.” They did not take into account the thin, rocky soil of the Plains, the harsh sun, violent wind, and long, frigid winters, or the effect of the Rocky Mountain rain shadow, which regularly made this area, technically, a desert. Instead they relied on the idea that somehow, water could be conjured magically from dust, if you could only turn it over enough times.

As farmers turned the dirt on their new homesteads, they were plowing up the few organisms that had thrived on that landscape for millenia. In doing so, they were unwittingly destroying the very things keeping this landscape intact. In effect, their efforts to conjure lifegiving precipitation summoned catastrophe instead.

Gary Libecap: So you have hundreds of thousands of small farms in the western Great Plains. and then in the early 1930s, the drought began, and it began in the northern part, and gradually moved south, and so you’d have year in and year out, limited precipitation and the area always has wind so the combination was the potential for terrific wind erosion. 

SM: Despite the fact that the Great Plains region is one of the most drought-prone areas of the country, a catastrophic Dust Bowl was a new phenomenon, created in no small part by the fact that there were far too many small farms on the plains.

Gary Libecap: You wouldn’t have had it if it had all been in grass, and everybody been raising cattle, but 160-acre homesteads aren’t going to give you many cows. They have to cultivate the whole thing.

SM: The droughty nature of the region and the need to cultivate every arable inch are not separate.

Low levels of precipitation curb crop yields, which means farmers must plant more of a given crop to achieve the same level of production. What that meant in practice is that these dryland farmers had to plant every inch of available space to their cash crop, usually wheat, to eke out enough to feed their families and the markets. So these impoverished plains farmers plowed up all the prairie grass and when it didn’t rain once in March of 1932, what remained for each of them was 160 or so acres of bare dirt.

It was the uniformity of small farms that made the Dust Bowl inevitable. It was not one farm, or a few farms, that fed mile-high dust storms, it was mile after mile of bare farmland, each acre cultivated the same way. As Gary describes it– it was a massive coordination failure, where even larger, more diverse farms couldn’t survive.

Gary Libecap: If they’re surrounded by lots of small farms, then as the wind blows across these plowed lands, those larger particles are going to just come across to smother my crops. Larger farmers were in a position to survive, but they weren’t going to survive if they were surrounded by a bunch of small farms.

SM: It’s not exactly like these realities were unknown at the time either. In 1928, just four years before the Dust Bowl got underway, a highly influential publication entitled “Soil Erosion: A National Menace” was published.

So why were the scientific and policy communities taken in by the promise of “rain follows the plow?” There are likely many reasons– from the cynical and shrewd to simple ignorance. But one common reason this mantra was relatively unchallenged was simple wishful thinking. Settling the American hinterland was a national economic priority, but how could a nation of mostly farmers settle a desert? It must have seemed so perfect, then, very “chosen people,” very “manifest destiny,” to have the scientific community discover that– if you farm it, the rain will come.

But despite the paradox, while some scientists were expounding on “rain follows the plow” others were talking about erosion and declining soil fertility, and promoting scientifically sound strategies to prevent it. Strip cropping was one solution, where crops like corn and hay are planted in alternated strips, rather than in large continuous, single crop fields.

Gary Libecap: Strip cropping, the idea is it not only lets the soil rest between crops, but also as the wind blows across the surface of land it hits those stalks and drops the particles. And basically, that’s the end of the erosion problem.

SM: The problem with strip cropping is that to do it effectively, farmers would need to plant something other than grains on at least a third of their farm– essentially fallowing a large part of their very small property every year. No small homesteader could afford to do that.

The other recommended prevention measure in this era– planting shelterbelts or windbreaks, was also a non-starter for farmers on the edge of economic survival.

Though the record indicates that prediction and prevention of the dust bowl were possible given the scientific knowledge at the time, agricultural science might not have actually been the biggest problem in this era. The problem was that small farmers had plowed up the prairie, and then they were impossible to coordinate when the drought began. So even though people had knowledge that continuing cultivation was making matters worse, there was no way, in the early 1930s, to get this mass of independent farmers aligned. Plus individual property rights and tax bills made farmers desperate to produce whatever they could to keep what they had.

Hypothetically, even if you were the richest, most progressive, and environmentally minded farmer on the plain, and you did everything right, your efforts would still likely prove fruitless– because your neighbor’s topsoil could smother your crops, even if yours stayed in place.

Gary Libecap: So I’m a small farmer and I decide, I’m just going to do this. I’m going to put a third of my farm into fallow. If you strip crop it and I’m going to put up shelter belts where I can and so forth and so on. But my farm is so small that the downwind benefits, I’m not going to be capturing those. So there are a lot of upfront costs. I’m not going to get much. My neighbor, just down from me, that person is going to get all the benefits of my action and not have to do anything, essentially. So there’s this huge free riding problem.

SM: All of these factors; the size of allotments, the poverty of the region, and the inability of farmers to take individual action to improve their own condition, contributed to the collective action problem that defined the Dust Bowl.

The good news is that, at some level, farmers and the powers that be understood this collective action problem, even at the time. This realization helped lead to the formation of new, local soil conservation districts, which helped to organize farmers to take collective action to avoid soil erosion.

But it also led to much grander actions, at the highest echelons of power. Congress and FDR’s secretary of agriculture, wanted to do something more to arrest the carnage on American farmland. They wanted to create a federal policy that would align farmers, with a combination of carrots and sticks, in an effort to ensure that the enormous agrarian class would not be brought to its knees environmentally or economically again.

So they set out to write the nation’s first Farm Bill.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

PART 2: Do Something

SM: When we think about modern versions of the Farm Bill, it’s easy to forget that this is the era that gave rise to this legislation, and that this moment had a very specific influence on how the Farm Bill worked back then, and how it works today.

Jonathan Coppess: The first Farm Bill was flat-out emergency legislation. 

SM: That’s Jonathan Coppess, former administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Administration

and associate professor of agricultural policy and law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Jonathan Coppess: If you go back and look at the text of this, it basically was, the sky has fallen. And Mr. Secretary, here’s just broad authority. Do what you think you gotta do to improve crop prices and farm incomes and help farmers out.

SM: There were many reasons why Congress was anxious to help farmers in this era, the Dust Bowl was certainly one– but the other ongoing crisis– the Great Depression– inspired similar urgency.

See, before the land started buckling under the weight of exhaustive farming, the markets had. Since 1919, when the First World War ended, prices for agricultural commodities had cratered. It was a simple case of supply and demand– the global conflict, which destroyed massive amounts of agricultural production in Europe, sucked up America corn, wheat, and cotton like nothing ever had before. Farmers planted more and more, and the war had made it profitable to do so.

And then the war ended, and prices plummeted. And farmers planted more and more and more again, because when corn goes from $1.30 a bushel one year to $0.47 a bushel the next, farmers need a lot more bushels to make the same income. So in the markets too, farmers suffered from their inability to coordinate their action, and on the glut of ever-growing supply, prices kept sinking lower. By the time the rest of the nation experienced the market crash of 1929, farm country had been mired in a Depression for a decade. And then came the drought, and the wind.

So Congress came together to face this two-headed monster, and dreamed up a policy that– as Jonathan referenced– empowered ag secretary Henry Wallace to do something, anything, to relieve the suffering in the markets and on the land. So Wallace turned to the familiar strategies of his era to craft a revolutionary policy.

Jonathan Coppess: The best description I’ve heard of it is that it was an industrial policy for agriculture. So, you think like Ford Motor Company and Ford Motor Company has too many cars on the lots and in production, what do they do? They’re going to lay off workers and idle plants, right? They’re going to pull down productive capacity until demand improves and they go back, right? You can’t do that in agriculture because you had millions of farmers. And so each one has a motivation to maximize their production and overproduce the market. What we can do is create a policy that does something similar through USDA. And so the idea was effectively to lay off farmland.

SM: How this farmland layoff program worked is key. The government didn’t send stooges to force land out of production; it instead offered to “rent” farmland, just like a tenant would.

And the government was, to most, an ideal tenant. It never haggled over rent and it didn’t gripe over broken fences or depleted soils. Like an ideal roommate, the government never even came around, but they paid just the same.

The goal behind this policy for lawmakers was that, by giving farmers rent, you could get them to fallow, or set aside, say 50 acres of every 160-acre corn or wheat farm– the end result would mean significantly fewer commodities in the market, which should, in theory, raise the price.

Jonathan Coppess: The practical reality was it didn’t work. That ultimately what you did was, they applied it to three major crops, corn, wheat, and cotton, but it meant that you had to plant, say, less cotton, but you could move those acres to corn or wheat or some other crop. 

SM: Acreage shifting was possible because the policy only determined what farmers could not plant–

a given acre of cotton, the program would say, must no longer be planted to cotton. But the policy did not determine what else farmers could do on that acre. After all, the government had handed over that control when it distributed private property. To wrest it back now would, at least to some, be a constitutional affront.

So farmers simply stopped planting cotton on a cotton acre, and planted corn instead, which undermined the fundamental goals of the policy. It meant that, rather than actually reducing the supply of corn, cotton or wheat, production just shifted around to different acres and regions, meaning the land that was meant to be fallow, and creating anti-erosion benefits, was instead just being used to grow some other cash crop. The South had a particular advantage when it came to acreage shifting– because they could grow corn and cotton in Georgia, but the same was not true in, say, Illinois.

But then, in 1936, the Supreme Court decided that the production control measures in the ‘33 Act were invalid anyway, on the grounds that the federal government had no right to regulate the local business of farming. So just three years after the first Farm Bill was passed, it was dead in the water.

Congress took another crack at a Farm Bill in 1936, not least because the Dust Bowl had been raging for four long years. Prices were still low, the economy was in shambles, people were starving. And the second Farm Bill was given a green halo– it was called the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act. But at its heart, it was the same policy, and it failed, just like the first one.

By 1938, it was time to try something different, and the key feature of the third bill was the creation of marketing quotas, which represented a switch from just laying off acreage

To actually controlling how much farmers could sell. The goal being to hold grain off the market during boom years, and release stored grain during poor years.

Jonathan Coppess: This was Secretary Wallace, his grand concept of an ever-normal granary so that the USDA could not only manage the acres of production, it could also manage having like this emergency supply in case a drought hammered the Western Wheat region again.

SM: Henry Wallace’s ever normal granary was the brainchild of an idealistic prairie populist. He believed in the New Deal, in science, in the collective power of farmers and rural people, and that USDA, his department, could combine these things to better society for all.

Jonathan Coppess: But underneath there’s a lot of naivety about how it’s going to work. And so Southern members of Congress who controlled the committees, controlled the gavels, wrote the legislation, they very much wanted to use it as, and this is just awful, to drive people out of farming to drive particularly sharecroppers out of it and basically consolidate land holdings and use it as a way to subsidize their own modernization.

SM: If you remember last episode– and the desperate actions of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, this is what lay behind so many of their grievances. It wasn’t just Jim Crow, and the Depression, and the horrifying violence of cotton harvesting itself. It was the fact that the levers of political power were being brought to bear against them. These Farm Bills were, to many, a declaration of war, the haves against the have nots.

This was also the experience of the Joad family in the Grapes of Wrath. They were broke, evicted when they couldn’t pay the mortgage, and chased off the land they’d homesteaded in part by the tractor and its robotic driver, which was bought and paid for with the generous assistance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

In the fall of 1939, lightning struck twice for American agriculture. Rain returned to the Western plains, ending the Dust Bowl. And the second World War started in Europe, bringing back voracious demand for U.S. crops, and the urgent need to fallow acres and reduce production evaporated overnight.

But the fundamental problems of the Farm Bill would outlast the war, and by the 1950s, the convenient advantages the South had carved out for itself would lead to a collapse and reconstruction of the Farm Bill Coalition.

But Jonathon points out that despite the many years and Farm Bills that have passed since this time, elements of those original policies persist in the Farm Bill legislation of today. The earliest Farm Bills were a desperate response to twin crises, but the problem with early legislation is that it very quickly becomes the status quo. This, despite the fact that these Farm Bills failed to bring about the desired effects of normalizing production to protect farmers from massive price swings and reducing the damage of exhaustive farming practices on the landscape.

Farm policy makers and advocates are still struggling today not just with the fallout of these decisions, but from the consequences of the many fixes and repairs we’ve tried to make along the way.

But the raging Dust Bowl, the struggling markets, and a flailing Congress and USDA were not the only factors affecting families like the Joads in this era. In fact, the face of their misery was not weather, prices, or politicians. Their plague was the tractor– and the rising tidal wave of labor-replacing tools that were about to be turbocharged by a global war to end all wars.

How America’s farms and farmers were broken and repaired by a new generation of weapons, turned to agtech. And how farm policy helped them buy it all.

That’s after the break.

[BREAK]

Intro:

This podcast is made possible by Ambrook. Ambrook builds financial management software for farms, ranches, and businesses across the American supply chain. It’s an all-in-one platform that simplifies accounting, record-keeping, and payments workflows while empowering operators with visibility into the health of their business. Here’s Dan, co-founder of Ambrook, on what customers love about Ambrook:

[NEW AD]

Outro:

That was Dan on how Ambrook grows with its customers. Tune in to the rest of the season to hear from other members of the Ambrook team on why they chose to join and what motivates them to build the financial layer powering American farms.

Now, back to the show.

[END BREAK]

PART 3: Paying to Win the War

SM: For all that FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace may have believed in the power of the people and of agrarian values, he was also a man of science and industry. He actually started a seed company in 1926 called Hi-Bred Corn Company which became Pioneer, the world’s first and largest hybrid seed company. Wallace brought his interest in ag science and technology with him to the office of the Secretary of Agriculture, along with a firm belief that advancing agricultural science and tech would make the world a better place for everyone– farmers most of all.

It’s not hard to imagine then, that at the start of World War II, when markets and weather started to turn in American agriculture’s favor, he and many of his contemporaries were thrilled to see what kind of investments farmers would make with their windfall of income, especially investments that would make their farms more productive and profitable.

Anne Effland: Not only is agriculture really booming during the war, but so is industry. 

SM: That’s Anne Effland, a retired USDA researcher and historian, who spent 25 years in the department’s Economic Research Service in the office of the chief economist.

Anne Effland: So industry has developed all of these capacities to make poisons and other things that have been used in the war for one reason or another. Also, some of that nitrogen production that’s used in munitions can now be turned to fertilizer. So all of a sudden, there’s this industrial capacity and need for a market for all of these manufactured chemical inputs. 

SM: Perhaps the most famous of the poisons that Anne is referring to here is di-chloro-di-phenyl-trich-loro-ethane, or DDT. DDT was initially discovered in 1825, but its insecticidal properties weren’t identified until 1939. And not a moment too soon, as DDT proved vital to controlling insect populations that might have otherwise ravaged Allied Forces’ troops with typhus, malaria, and dengue fever.

And as the war began to ramp down, DDT-makers like Dupont and Monsanto had good news. There were peacetime uses for this tool as well, as it proved to be a broad spectrum insecticide.

The saga of DDT was just one of countless stories of how wartime technologies were primed to transform agriculture. Anne also mentioned nitrogen production for munitions– which during peacetime promised to replace all the manure and guano that was too rare and expensive on American farms with enough synthetic ammonia to feed the world’s most productive crops.

On top of this add advances in plant and animal breeding, in rubber tires and other synthetic materials, in engines and countless machines that would help make farming faster, more productive, and more profitable.

It wasn’t just farmers who were eager to see these advances either. The federal government, fighting the second total war of the century, was also concerned about maintaining high levels of agricultural productivity even as they tore millions from the land, either directly to work as soldiers, or indirectly through purchasing, which spurred factory work.

Anne Effland: Manufacturing has also grown. It’s pulling labor off the land, some of it, more happily than others, but in fact it creates a situation where the return to the land after the war is far less likely. 

SM: When the war was over, initiatives like the 1944 GI Bill meant many would-be farmers could now go to college, buy homes in the suburbs, and abstain from the vulnerable, back-breaking labor of farming or farm work, in favor of jobs in factories and offices that came with protections and benefits.

On the other hand, federal programs were pumping money and support into the ag economy, and so the calculus for farmers was simple: Replace people, whenever possible, with technology.

I think it can be easy to look back on this tumultuous period in agriculture and see it as the moment when farmers, at the behest of USDA, took a wrong turn. When some started to think of farms as factories, when manure and the weeding hoe were replaced by chemicals, when farmers stopped planting many things in favor of the efficiency of mono-cropping, and started to move away from livestock– unless it was confined. This era marked the beginning of industrial agriculture. But Anne reminded me that back then, this did not feel like a wrong turn.

At the time, Americans were in the midst of the second worldwide conflict of their generation. At war’s end, the threat of the Cold War and then the conflict in Korea led many to believe a third global conflict was at their doorstep. The starving times of the Depression haunted people.

The idea of having enough to eat was not the given it is for many today; it was an idea that was still struggled for regularly, and insects and weeds, the vagaries of horse-driven plows, and the fertilizer they produced, those things were obstacles in the way of security.

The art of farming was being replaced by a science, and many Americans both within agriculture and without, were happy about it.

As the war waned, wartime demand for agricultural commodities did too, but farmers did not fall into an economic depression as they did after the first world war. In part because there was still a Farm Bill in place. So interest in acreage controls, or laying off acres, returned, not to protect topsoil or reduce wind erosion this time, but to raise prices.

The problem of course, was that prior issues with the Farm Bill had not been fixed, and now they were being compounded by all the improvements in productivity that had been made on American farms since the start of the war.

Anne Effland: Part of that policy requires setting aside some land because to control the surplus, we reduce acres. So a supply control system that only reduces land provides an incentive for increasing yields on other land. So you get this situation where least productive land is set aside, most productive land is encouraged to produce even more through these inputs and new machinery and consolidation and larger fields and specialization of your cropping.

SM: Again, the land layoff strategy was flawed from the get-go, but as farmers got more and more productive, it became more and more problematic. Farmers could set aside acres, get their federal payments, and use the income to increase their productivity on the acres still in production. In effect, a farm might set aside an acre that would have yielded 20 bushels of wheat, and use the funds to buy fertilizers, seeds, and equipment that can help wring 50 bushels from the acre next door, more than doubling total production even on fewer acres.

In short, federal set-aside programs were acting like lighter fluid, enflaming overproduction of commodity grains even while they were ostensibly meant to quench the fire. And American agriculture, and the Farm Bill, have been battling with overproduction ever since.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

PART 4: History Repeats

SM: In the middle of the 20th century, American farmers survived an era of crises. The collision of the Dust Bowl, two decades of agricultural depression, and the second World War, might have doomed American agriculture, and the American economy more broadly. And to prevent this, the federal government stepped in time and time again to try and improve the conditions on the nation’s farmland with the policy tools they had at their disposal.

We live with the impact of these efforts today. They’ve given us a market of partially managed production, heavily influenced by the availability of government-backed lending, and technologies and practices that the government helped pay for. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “free” market. It is– in a way that might have pleased some populists– very much a market with guardrails, with safety nets in place to protect farmers from economic or environmental harm.

But over the intervening years, it’s also proven to be a gamable market, where big farmers have reaped massive rewards, and many small farms have disappeared. We’ve had almost 100 years of Farm Bills since the very first one (and there’s one up for renewal or re-writing as I’m recording this episode), and I think a lot of people would argue that most of them have failed.

Since the first Farm Bill, essentially all of America’s sharecroppers and small tenants have been kicked off the land. Thousands of farms have gone bankrupt. Thousands of vibrant rural communities and many feet of topsoil have been lost. If the goal of the Farm Bills was to prevent these calamities, they failed.

On the other side of the ledger– America fed itself through two World Wars, and its ability to feed itself and its allies through the Cold War was certainly an element of victory. Productivity on American farms has skyrocketed. Farmers in 1900 could feed about 10 people with an acre of land, today, they can feed 165. America’s farmers are richer, more efficient, and more secure than at any other time in U.S. history. So, if the aim of the Farm Bills was to advance those goals, they have succeeded.

This conclusion– that the Farm Bills have done some good, some harm, felt like something of a cop out to me. I wanted something more concrete– a discerning expert’s opinion on whether the Farm Bill deserves to be saved, or whether it might be best to cut our losses and start over again from scratch. I put the question to Anne, and she offered a perspective on the evolution of the Farm Bill that I hadn’t considered before.

Anne Effland: I really do think that, if you look at other sectors of the economy, what we have are very large, very concentrated, corporate structures that produce most of the material things that we live with. We never tried to maintain one shoemaker per community. We never tried to maintain one hardware store per community or a blacksmith or the old artisanal aspects and one of the effects of policy has been to slow down that consolidation in a certain sense so that although what we see is a family farm now, maybe thousands of acres, but it’s still family operated. I think because of all this price support, we have not seen the move towards giant corporate, non-family owned types of farming that we’ve seen in other sectors. 

SM: When Anne first presented this argument to me, I balked. Consolidation is a huge problem in agriculture, and though many farms in America may not be “corporate-owned,” they’re still multi-million dollar businesses. But setting aside my own bias here, Anne is actually making a valid point. To understand it though, requires us to think about scale.

Many people, including folks like Jonathan Coppess, would point to the Farm Bill as a cause of consolidation in agriculture– and I think that’s right. But it could also be true that Farm Bill programs have arrested consolidation at a certain scale, especially when we compare it to other industries.

Almost all American industries have seen consolidation in recent decades. But where once there was a local bank, a local hardware store, a local cafe in every town in America, today, in most towns, it’s a Wells Fargo next to a Home Depot next to a Starbucks. Anne argues, accurately I think, that the level of consolidation in agriculture is not as severe as the level of consolidation in other sectors. There are many towns and counties in America that are not home to a single locally owned bank, hardware store, or cafe. But every county in America is likely home to at least one family-owned farm. And most, to many.

Perhaps it seems like this fact is true in spite of the Farm Bill, and not because of it, but Anne would argue otherwise. Without the protections of the Farm Bill, with its commodity payments, conservation programs, and crop insurance, every drought, every freak derecho, hurricane, or pest outbreak of the last 100 years would have led to a crush of farm bankruptcies and failures. And by now, most of the families that still own farms would have lost them and been forced by bad luck or desire for security that simply would not exist on the land without the Farm Bill.

And yet I think plenty of people would still argue that it would be better if the Farm Bill had preserved a smaller scale of farm, and that today’s Farm Bill should be altered in such a way that

larger farms, family-owned or not, get less federal support, and smaller farms get more.

This seemingly straightforward aim, Anne says, perfectly illustrates why it’s so important to study policy history, and to carefully think about all the potential impacts of policy changes before we make them.

Anne Effland: I think we need to consider if our policy were intended to reduce consolidation by way of no longer supporting those large-scale farms, what the potential consequences of those kinds of changes are important to consider ahead of time. And so if the tie between large-scale farming and government policy is completely broken the outcome might not be back to more 500-acre farms. It might be to global farming operations. We might have 16 mega-corporate farms with land in three continents. And control of the markets and transportation.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: Today, our lawmakers may be mulling these exact kinds of tradeoffs as they scheme about the current Farm Bill. But in the meantime, life goes on.

The USDA is still using its authority under the most recent 2018 measure, and other appropriations since then, to carry out farm programs. The department still rents farmland acres, though mostly now for conservation purposes, mainly through what’s known as the Conservation Reserve Program, where farmers can apply to have certain acres set aside, generally because they are marginal or have some environmental significance, and the USDA will pay for this.

But in recent years, USDA has intervened in American ag for a much bigger purpose– with the stated aim of helping American farmers improve their resiliency to climate change. These so-called “climate smart” ag programs garnered $4 billion in funding under the Biden administration, and some funded projects would not have been out of place in the wake of the Dust Bowl. One project I looked at– led by a private company called Sustainable Oils, proposes to help farmers grow camelina, a plant that kind of looks like sesame or flax, with a head of fine oil seeds at the top. Camelina can be grown as a winter cover crop in places like Kansas and Oklahoma– the heart of the former Dust Bowl, providing a shield to help keep dirt in place when the dry winter winds blow.

Allen Schrag: So last year we planted our camelina, I think the day before Thanksgiving, 

SM: That’s Allen Schrag, a Kansas farmer who’s participating in this Climate Smart program.

Allen Schrag: And we got a very nice stand, and we had an unusual winter. We actually had a big snow, and we haven’t had much big snow for the last 15 years. And only then did we find out that camelina doesn’t like its feet wet. 

SM: I reached out to Allen because I wanted to get a sense of how federal programs, especially programs that advance the creation or adoption of ag technologies, are still, to this day, shaping the way that farmers make decisions about the way they use their farmland. Allen is certainly an example of this. He’s tried other experimental crops in the past, but without Sustainable Oils pitching this new seed, and without their USDA-supported agronomist coming out to give advice, and without the arrangements the USDA-supported coalition had made to ensure a market for the stuff once it was grown, Camelina would likely not have been worth trying for Allen. And that’s saying something, because Allen’s farm has been using cover crops for eight years, and they are no strangers to evaluating a new opportunity.

Allen Schrag: We decided this would be a fit, because if camelina would work like it does on paper, you go plant four or five hundred acres Thanksgiving day instead of eating turkey and harvested all the last week of May, where we’re not doing any harvest, you have full season beans, you actually end up with two fairly good cash crops off the same acre. And the market, the camelina oil goes to aviation fuel. So that should be an unlimited market, but you got to make it work before you plant 500 acres.

SM: Allen still has his doubts on this last point– learning a new crop takes time and trial and error, and given the limitations on moisture in his area, and the current pricing structure for camelina

he’s not confident it’ll always make sense to grow it as a cash crop. But he does think the crop has appeal as a cover crop alone– it gave the soybeans that followed it a yield boost. So he’ll go on running the numbers for now, and USDA will go on trying to help.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

The funny thing about the early Farm Bills is that they really just represented the latest iteration of America’s ongoing efforts to shape and reshape the American landscape. Without provoking the political third rail that is “land reform.” Here’s Jonathan Coppess again:

Jonathan Coppess: As we spent billions of dollars from 1956 through 1970 paying farmers to remove acres from production for basically controls and conservation type things, then in Earl Butz’s 1970, early 70s push, we put all that acres back into production only to have to pay to pull it back out again in the 80s. 

SM: Policy, as Jonathan told me, is always reactionary. It does not blaze trails into the future, it responds to the recent past, it tries to make improvements, and it often creates twice as many new problems in the process. Farm policy is no different. The science we pay for today will one day look silly. The bills we write today we might one day come to regret. Every small change in today’s thousand plus page farm bill comes with countless unintended consequences, and that is what’s important to remember when anyone promises that reform will make things better. Because it might get better and it might also get worse.

The funny thing about this whole period, and the time that came after, is that it gave people who actually lived through it hope. Not just any people either. It gave John Steinbeck, who’s grapes, I don’t have to remind you, were full of wrath, Steinbeck’s righteous anger on behalf of the Joad family and the real life people they represented, touched the hearts of the nation. He was a man who traveled with the dispossessed people he likened to the tribes of Israel, he witnessed their persecution, poverty, and in some cases, their deaths in the false land of milk and oranges that was California.

He believed that the changes that followed this era of crises, specifically, the political changes– were positive, revolutionary, and made America a stronger, better place for many.

John Steinbeck Interviewer: Well, do you think that there’s any one thing that was responsible for bringing about this, this really revolutionary change? Is there any one thing to which it can be attributed?

Steinbeck: Oh, yes, I think so.I think that we suddenly, through necessity, achieved a government which was responsible for all of its people. And I think this had not happened before. This had, I think, very little to do with administration. I mean, with the political administration of the time. I think any party that had been in then would have been forced to make such arrangements or to have disappeared it. The fact that we were able to make it, is one, I think, of the proofs of our safety. The responsibility, I think, and the spreading of responsibility, the lack of islands of safety, in actual warfare against other islands of population, I think that’s what did it. And I also think that it can’t ever be lost. We still have many problems. But, I think the safe thing is that we have solved so many of them and that the solutions have been the product of ourselves, the product of our own people, working together. They have many more to solve, but at least we’re on the way there.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

CONCLUSION

SM: Between the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the Wars, the relationship between America and its farmland would never be the same. Going into this era, farmland, for most, was home. Homestead and community, work and school, family and trusted friend. It was fields and woods, ponds and prairies at sunrise, gardens and bird nests. It was the final resting place of the honored past and the promise of the future.

But coming out of this period, farmland was shredded and torn into pieces. To the farmer, there was the homeplace, and there was the rest, some rented ground nearby, the dirt for growing a crop. This was working land, not to be trusted too readily. To the nation, farmland was a source of economic distress and vital nourishment, something to be carefully managed. To the American people, farmland was newly an extension of nature for all, something that called out for conservation and protection. Before this era, farmland contained all these elements, and something more sacred too, but the calamities of the 1930s and 40s broke it apart, so that these aims could be pursued separately, by specialized groups, and in the unwinding, something sacred, something that the Joad’s knew about, was lost.

In the last few episodes of this podcast, we’re going to tackle three of the things that farmland became after the end of the second world war. An idea, a target for conservation, but firstly, and perhaps most importantly, it became an asset, an investment, something, in some ways, more valuable than gold.

Howard Halderman: The blue chip nature of it is, it provides that consistent annual cash return, and historically speaking, a 4-5 percent appreciation. So the Corn Belt is going to generate a 2 to 3 percent return today cash yield and a 4 or 5 appreciation. It’s an all in 6, 7, 8 percent returning asset and it’s like widgets coming out of a factory in that regard.

SM: How farmland became a more reliable investment than Wall Street, and how your retirement account farms its value— next time, on The Only Thing That Lasts.

SIGN OFF

SM: Before we sign off, I talked through information from a number of sources and experts today, so if you want to dig into it yourself, check out the shownotes, or our website for links.

While you’re there, make sure you head over to ambrook.com SLASH research to stay up on the latest reporting from the Ambrook team on agriculture, land, and environmental issues like the ones we talk about here on the show. After you subscribe to the podcast, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, and follow @AmbrookAg on socials for news about upcoming projects and stories. And we can’t wait to hear what you think! If you like what we’re doing, let us know, and don’t forget to share.

The Only Thing That Lasts is an Ambrook Research production. This podcast is written, produced, and mixed by me, Sarah Mock. Our editor is Jesse Hirsch, with support by Ali Aas and Bijan Stephen. Technical support by Dan Schlosser, and general support by Mackenzie Burnett and the whole team at Ambrook.

A final note, Ambrook Research, the media outlet that produced this podcast, is 100% editorially independent from Ambrook, the fintech company that funds it.