8
as a normative ideal so that the nation ought to help family farms. Instead, they talked about the
national economic benefits of farm subsidies.
Though evidence suggests there are practical political reasons why family farms were not
singled out, such as Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace wanted to ensure the support of
large farms,
22
or that policymakers implicitly thought of family farms when they spoke in the
generic terms of farms and farmers,
23
by far the most glaring reason is that policymakers at this
time lacked an established language for talking about the family farm as a distinct type or
category of farm. When politicians and opinion leaders talk about family farms prior to World
War II, it served largely as political background—the location for events or the place where one
was raised—it was not a category of farms distinct from other types of farms (i.e. corporate
farms) and hence could not need or deserve state intervention.
W
HY
W
ORLD
W
AR
II?
World War II opened the door for comprehensive discussions about where American
agriculture policy ought to go in the future;
24
war preparations, production, and post-war anxiety
about how to return to “normalcy” stressed continued state involvement with agriculture policy
and a normative commitment to the family farm. This domestic policy response to the war not
only changed agriculture, it also changed the way that Americans talked about agriculture.
Historical evidence points to two key reasons why the family farm as a concept came to take the
more political meaning as a distinct type of agriculture during this time.
First and foremost, war preparations and full-scale mobilization revolutionized American
agricultural production and popularized the notion that the family farm was endangered by
technology that would produce factory farms.
25
Increased demand for agricultural products by
domestic and foreign consumers led the federal government to prod farmers to likewise increase
their wartime production. Old labor-intensive farming practices were quickly modernized to use
more advanced equipment when young men left the farms for service abroad or better paying
22
Kirkendall 1987.
23
New Deal Under Secretary of Agriculture, M.L. Wilson explained three decades after the Agricultural Adjustment
Act: “Everyone is a creature of his home environment, and as a child he develops in his mind stereotypes which he
carries with him throughout his life. I was born in a community of corn belt farmers where the farms ranged from
quarter to half-sections in size [i.e. 160 to 320 acres]. Therefore, instinctively when I am talking about farmers, I am
actually thinking about the kind of farmers and farm families that live on the farms that you look down upon when
you fly over the Corn Belt" (Gilbert 2001, p. 221). According to European Sigmund von Frauendorfer (1929), “The
family farm so predominates in the United States that everybody who uses the general term ‘farmer’ thinks almost
automatically of the operator or a family farm” (as cited by Brewster 1979, p. 65).
24
As early as 1941, the USDA published a series of bulletins on postwar plans (Why We Must Plan for Peace; Win
the War—Then the Peace, Farm Prosperity Depends on the City). The USDA Interbureau Committee on Post-war
Programs released Agriculture When the War Ends in October of 1943, and in October 1944 the Committee on
Postwar Agricultural Policy of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities released a widely-circulated
report titled Postwar Agriculture Policy. The committees report summed up the premise of many of those
concerned about long-range agriculture: “the family-type farm should remain the basis on which American
agriculture is typically organized” Postwar Agricultural Policy, Report of the Committee on Postwar Agricultural
Policy of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities 1944, p.30
25
Often referred to as the “family-farm problem.”
Convention