Paul K. Conkin, an emeritus professor of history at Vanderbilt University, grew up on a Tennessee tobacco farm and had connections to his sister's dairy operation in Pennsylvania. He thus brings a wealth of personal experience to document and interpret the changes that transformed American agriculture over the past 80 years. Conkin is at his best in providing the rich detail that comes from firsthand observations of farm life and practice. This is especially true when dealing with the traditional family farm as he knew it and when examining the World War II era and its aftermath. In these discussions he does a nice job of drawing on national data to illustrate how his own observations jived with larger trends.
Although I sometimes disagreed with his causal interpretations, on balance, his analysis of New Deal farm programs represents a masterful job of coherently integrating the key legislation and concerns of that turbulent period. I am similarly impressed with Conkin's treatment of farm surpluses and payments and of farm structural issues. This handsome volume is a useful contribution and the main theme that there was a revolution is well supported.
However, as the author moves away from his familiar turf, there are major analytical and factual problems. Conkin repeats the widely accepted view that the revolution in American agriculture began in the 1930s and that before that rough date almost all changes of any importance before were laborsaving machinery. This runs counter to Paul Rhode's and my findings and counter to the experiences of most tobacco farmers Conkin knew so well. In several articles published in this JOURNAL, and most recently in Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Rhode and I argue that biological technologies were the dominate form of innovation in the pre1930 era. Similar problems arise elsewhere in the book, leading to a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of American agricultural development.
His rendition of the diffusion grain harvesting equipment is questionable throughout and at times obviously wrong. The use of “canvas on rollers that moved the fallen grain up to a platform on the reaper,” was not “standard after 1864.” This technology was always a sideshow to self-binding technologies. The header that gained wide acceptance in California was not so named “because the horses pushed the grain head from behind” (which they did), but because the cutting bar was positioned high so as to remove only the top or head of the plant bearing the grain. And threshing became a “major customized task” well before the “late nineteenth century” (pp. 4–14). Unfortunately, there are many more problems of this sort. More generally, the book is under-referenced so many statements such as “farmers worked more days out of the year than city workers” (p. 4), must be taken largely on faith. In addition, too many statements that should have been treated as testable hypotheses assumed an undeserved veil of factual authenticity.
His summary of the diffusion and impact of tractors, combines, and the cotton harvester is superior to his treatment of early grain harvesting. Nevertheless, these accounts could have benefited significantly from consulting recent works by economic historians. I enjoyed his brief discussion of a range of chemical inputs and would refer the reader who desires a longer run treatment of some of the issues raised to Creating Abundance.
The account of plant and animal breeding lacks historical perspective and is too brief for my taste given the subject's importance. Given the great achievements of cotton, corn, and wheat breeders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Conkin's assertion that hybrid corn “is arguably the most important plant-breeding innovation in the United States” is hard to defend. He is in the mainstream in making such a claim, but the mainstream is simply ill-informed about what breeders accomplished.
The chapter entitled “Alternatives,” is delightfully weird and quite unexpected. The first part deals with the history of economic thought and utopian schemes. One is catapulted into the worlds of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Carey, Comte Claude Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, the Mennonites and Amish, Thomas Spence, and George Henry Evan (the Working Man's Party in New York). This all provides a context for a discussion of sustainable agriculture and organic farming. I am not sure if it works for everyone, but I liked it.
Overall, there is much to recommend in this book, but I am afraid that some readers will have a hard time winnowing the grain from the chaff.
