Beyond Tractors: The History of Technology in American Agriculture

Abstract

Review Essay BEYOND TRACTORS: THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY IN AMERICAN AGRICULTURE DEBORAH FITZGERALD In his presidential address to the Agricultural History Society eighteen years ago, Clarence Danhof delivered a sharp critique of the state of the Held. Danhof, who was acutely disappointed in the “randomness” of works in agricultural history, argued that the literature suffered from a lack of boundaries, whether these bound­ aries referred'to geography, time, disciplinary approach, or theoret­ ical grounding. Anything that concerned agriculture in history had been given a hearing, even though much of it was poorly conceived and executed, lacking in both context and a connection with general history. And no agreement existed about what larger agenda agricul­ tural history had or should have. What were the big questions, the grand theories, the rationale for historians to study one issue and not another? If individual works were the bricks of a larger edifice, then, according to Danhof, they were currently lying in a disorganized heap.1 Danhof’s critique of agricultural history could well be leveled against the history of agricultural technology, were it not that the latter category of scholarship hardly exists. Very few historians of technology consider agriculture their primary area of research, and historians of agriculture, while often acknowledging the importance of technology in shaping modern agriculture, rarely consider its role in any depth. Works that might be considered histories of agricultural technology are, therefore, a hodgepodge and share no discipline, Dr. Fitzgerald, assistant professor of the history of technology in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of The Business ofBreeding: Hybrid Com in Illinois, 1890—1940 (Cornell University Press, 1990). She thanks Thomas Broman, W. Bernard Carlson, Kenneth Keniston, Judith McGaw, and Merritt Roe Smith for helping to clarify both her ideas and her prose. 'Clarence H. Danhof, “Whither Agricultural History?” Agricultural History 47 (1973): 1-8.© 1991 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/91/3201-0004$01.00 114 The History of Technology in American Agriculture 115 methodology, or design. There is no overarching research agenda (never mind competing agendas), few big ideas, and almost no rationale represented there. Rather, each individual work is offered presumably as another brick in the edifice for which no blueprint has been drawn. A working definition of agricultural technology would seem to be in order, and I would offer the following: agricultural technology refers to the process of systematically cultivating plants and animals, includ­ ing the economic, mechanical, human, scientific, and institutional forces that support such activity. The production of foods (for humans and livestock) and fibers are the most prominent features of the agricultural system, and the material components of production, such as farm implements, seeds, chemicals, and feeds, are often the most readily accessible vehicles for examining how technology has shaped agricultural practice. This definition, although broad, empha­ sizes the production process itself rather than isolated components of that process. It thus includes growing corn and raising hogs, manu­ facturing combines and reapers, canning vegetables, curing tobacco, processing beef, and breeding poultry, to name but a few examples. If one turns to more well-defined areas of the history of technology in search of interpretive models for studying agricultural technology, one is struck not by the singularity of approaches but by the variety. While making moldboards is, in gross respects, much like making automobiles or turbines, and the production of canned tomatoes similar to the production of cotton towels, agricultural production does not really parallel industrial production. While agribusiness naturally shares many of the salient technological concerns of indus­ try, farms and farmers do not correlate so easily with factories and workers. Farmers’ ownership of the means of production makes them more similar to artisans than to modern industrial workers in terms of autonomy, work pace, and community relations, and farmers’ increas­ ing reliance on the larger economic system of market forecasting, price supports, and legislative entitlements as well as political punish­ ments puts them in a unique class. Further, the role of agribusiness in providing seeds, chemicals, equipment, and livestock, as well as receiving the final product for further refinement, renders the farmer and his...