Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 2
From Subsistence to Production
How American Agriculture Was Made Modern
Agriculture and Rural Life
Less than one hundred years ago most rural households in the United States sustained them-
selves by farming. While some agricultural products were sold for money on the open mar-
ket, others were produced solely for household consumption or for bartering with neighbors.
All family members, including husbands, wives, and children, contributed their labor to the
economic maintenance and survival of the household. While there was a well-established di-
vision of labor along gender and age lines in many farm households, there was not a well-
articulated and formalized occupational structure within most rural areas. In this social and
economic context, the household, the community, and the economy were tightly bound up
with one another. The local economy was not something that could be isolated from society.
Rather the economy was embedded in the social relations of the farm household and the rural
community.
Local communities served as trade and service centers for the farming population. Rural
communities also served as places that nurtured participation in civic and social affairs, and
as such they could be viewed as nodes that anchored people to place. And, as most comment-
ators have noted, schools played a key role in solidifying and defining community boundar-
ies.
Two early rural sociologists, John H. Kolb and Edmund de S. Brunner, describe the settle-
ment of the Middle West and Far West this way. “Individual farms were settled by families
who went out to get land and to seek their fortunes. They settled in groups on adjoining farms
and were bound together by such ties as kinship, common nationality, the same education,
social, or religious purposes.” Within the rural communities, “Mutual aid, exchange of work,
building bees, social affairs, schools and churches soon became the organized ways of these
groups.” 1
In rural households, men, women, and children engaged in a wide range of productive
enterprises. On the farm, they grew crops, raised animals, cleared land, built and repaired
machinery, engaged in home-based manufacturing, and maintained the farmstead. A typical
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