Abstract
ABSTRACT Agribusinesses invest in harnessing the goodwill affiliated with US agrarianism and farm iconography, hoping publics transfer the goodwill they attach to farming onto corporations. To make apparent agribusiness’s rhetorical strategies, we analyze “For the Farmers,” a 2021–2022 John Deere and Anheuser-Busch collaborative campaign to raise money for the nonprofit Farm Rescue. We theorize how productive tensions—farmers as thriving vs. farmers as needy and farms as human spaces vs. farms as machine spaces—mobilize the contradictions of agribusiness mythmaking in the twenty-first century. Our analysis of this campaign’s beer packaging and promotional video offers scholars who are invested in food rhetoric and agricultural communication an invitation to notice how agribusiness atmospheres both host contradiction about imagined pasts and recenter white masculinity to evoke a secure future based on trust of industrial-scale farming and the hydrocarbon economy. By theorizing how rhetorical affect aligns drinking beer with rescuing farmers, we offer a model of critiquing agribusiness’s reliance on myths to promote their brands.
Published Version
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