Exploring Tomorrow’s Agriculture: Co-operative Group Farming––A Practical Program of Rural Rehabilitation, by Joseph W. Eaton and M. L. Wilson

Abstract

Cooperative group farming, the key to tomorrow's agriculture, is presented as a solution to many of America's rural problems, especially the challenge of technology, which is assumed to lead almost inevitably to the decline of the family-type farm and the rise of industrialized farming. A cooperative group farm is defined as an association of a number of farm families who operate jointly a large-scale enterprise and who equitably share the returns of their group effort. Very brief attention is given to Utopian cooperative group farms of the past, to the Hutterites, the Amana Society, privately sponsored projects in this country, and to cooperative group farms in Russia, Mexico and Palestine. The major portion of the book is devoted to cooperative farms established by the Farm Security Administration, and the development of such farms as a technique of rural rehabilitation. The need for rural rehabilitation is presented, not as a need arising during the depression to be abandoned when farm incomes are increased, but as a need growing out of long-time basic trends in agriculture. One of the major factors is mechanization which has as some social effects the reversal of the agricultural ladder, the rise in rents and land policies to levels higher than would be justified by their returns, and the decrease in stable farm labor employment opportunities. Between January 1937 and March 1942 the Farm Security Administration had established twenty-seven cooperative corporation farms located in all parts of the country except the Northeast and the Northwest. This does not include fourteen land-leasing associations. These twenty-seven are described in some detail; outlining physical layout, objectives, method of establishment, membership selection and turnover, legal organization, management, costs of establishment, subsidies, business success, working conditions, level of living and the growth of the communities as cooperative groups. On the whole, judged by the ten criteria of rural rehabilitation and the three surmountable obstacles of rural rehabilitation which Eaton develops, the farms appear to be successful. There are some weaknesses in administration; some of the farms still require subsidies and operate at a loss, and in many of them the members had n-o part in the