Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
farm in the United States in 1870, for example, was very small by today's standards. Most
farm families survived on less than seventy-five acres. Indeed, in 1870 less than one-third
of the nation's farms had one hundred acres of improved cropland. The typical family farm
produced a wide range of commodities, including dairy products (e.g., cheese, butter, milk),
tobacco, fresh fruits, and vegetables. Gross sales, though crudely estimated in the nineteenth
century, averaged about $1,200 a year. 2 Much of what was produced was not sold on the mar-
ket but rather was bartered for goods and services in the local community or else used for
home consumption.
Household-based productive activities in rural areas are more difficult to ascertain, since
no systematic data were ever collected in this area. However, we know from historical ac-
counts that the members of farm households produced abroad range of goods for their own
consumption including clothes, furniture, and housewares. Labor exchanges and bartering
were also an embedded feature of the economic life in rural communities.
Doug Harper describes the social nature of “changing works” this way:
The principle of changing works was that farmers informally organized themselves … to share
labor. There were many forms of changing works in different regions of the country, depending on
the duration of the work which needed to be done, the density of farms in a region, and the tech-
nology at a given stage of agricultural development… . In [Illinois in the 1920s] … farmers grew
several crops, including large fields of grain. Each July a group of farmers in a neighborhood col-
lectively rented a thresher, which they moved from one farm to another. Given the size of the grain
fields in the region, it took a thresher crew up to two weeks to do the crop on a single farm. While
harvesting the crop, the crew stayed on the farm. Thus, the farm women fed up to twenty people a
day for ten to fourteen days in a row…. 3
Some manufacturing of durable and nondurable goods in rural areas also took place out-
side of farm households. Many rural communities had metalworking enterprises, woodwork-
ing shops, and related activities. The Census of 1870, for instance, shows that in the three
most rural northern New England states, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, there were
12,162 manufacturing establishments. On average, these places employed fewer than ten
workers. Sawmills, blacksmith shops, flour and gristmills, wagon-making enterprises, and
leather-related industries, such as saddle/harness shops and shoe factories, predominated.
Much of this economic activity was organized around small, skilled, artisan shops. Artisan
shops are places that employ a handful of workers and do not use water or steam power in
the production process but rather rely on hand- or foot-powered machinery. Factories that re-
lied on water or steam power were virtually unknown in the United States in the early 1800s
and this type of economic organization did not penetrate rural areas of the country to any
great extent until after the Civil War. In 1810, for example, only 2.8 percent of the American
workforce could be found in such factories. 4 By 1870, however, 58 percent of the factories in
northern New England were waterpowered and another 6.7 percent were powered by steam.
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