Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
2 A New Agrarian Ideal: Foundations of Cooperative
Extension
What Needed Repair, and Why?
If Cooperative Extension was created as an institution of repair, what was
it supposed to fi x, and why? The answer starts with the profound changes
that began to transform U.S. agriculture during the nineteenth century.
Demographics do not tell the entire story, but consider that about 80
percent of working Americans were farmers in 1800, whereas fewer than
40 percent were by 1900 (Cochrane 1993; Dimitri, Effl and, and Conklin
2005). As Frank Norris described these changes in his novel The Octopus
(1901), the rapid pace of industrialization entangled U.S. agriculture in
powerful effects from the rise of commodity markets, increasing urbaniza-
tion, and the diminishing effects of time and distance through new tech-
nologies such as the railroad and the telegraph. While agriculture became
more tightly entwined in the institutions of industrial modernity, national
views about farming and rural life began to shift. More specifi cally, begin-
ning in the late nineteenth century, Progressive Era thought created a
political and cultural context in which agriculture could be seen as a kind
of social problem, in need of repair through state-sponsored expertise. This
view of farming turned the classic Jeffersonian vision of agriculture—where
the independence of the small family farm served as the foundation of U.S.
democracy—on its head. These changes set the context for a new vision
of agriculture and a role for agricultural science in creating it.
Overall, the cultural, economic, and political status of farming in
the United States at the turn of the twentieth century stood in stark
contrast to its position 100 years earlier. Cooperative Extension was created
in the early decades of the twentieth century in order to bring U.S. agri-
Search WWH ::




Custom Search