"Outside the Box..." Discussion

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2 Born in the U.S.A.

The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture

Peter A . Cocl anis

These are fast times for foodies, salad days for farmers markets, boutique producers, locavores, vegans, and the like. The words “local,” “organic,” and “slow” have assumed the status of mantras among many pious eaters, ostensi- bly facilitating spiritual transformations, even as “local,” “organic,” and “slow” in the real world generally translate into inflated food prices and plummeting agricultural productivity. There is a Food Network on TV; a lavish and lush journal devoted to food, Gastronomica; and wildly popular websites such as yelp.com, whose reviews can make or break restaurants anywhere in the country. The study of obesity has become phat, and an entire new book genre has emerged: commodity studies. Virtually every grain, spice, drink, and tuber now has its historian. I can’t get too snide here, of course, for I myself am working on rice! And in Chapel Hill, where I live, when the abbreviation “CSA” is mentioned, more people—dollars to doughnuts (Krispy Kreme or otherwise)—think of Community-Supported Agriculture than of the Con- federate States of America. Who would have thunk it?

Not long ago, things were far, far different. Indeed, in the late 1980s agri- culture seemed like yesterday’s news and the study of agricultural history atavistic. Around that time I began compiling a list of stories, anecdotes, and assorted (sordid?) facts suggestive of the diminishing hold of agriculture on the cultural imagination in this advanced postindustrial country. In 1988, for example, the venerable farm youth organization Future Farmers of America, founded in 1924, officially changed its name to FFA, in part to appeal to a broader “food system” constituency, in part, I suspect, because farming qua farming seemed off-putting and somewhat déclassé to modern teens. Inter- estingly enough, just a few years later—in 1991—Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed its corporate name to KFC for much the same reasons: the

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The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 37

company didn’t want to be associated too closely with the adjective “fried,” which at the time was becoming similarly déclassé, at least among some small but influential segments of the population. One intriguing, maybe even hopeful countertrend: in 2007, the company began using the old name, Ken- tucky Fried Chicken, as part of a corporate rebranding process in the United States. We’ll see where it leads: stay tuned.

On the whole, though, the evidence I kept coming across suggested that farming and farmers were long ago and far away. In 1998 a graduate-student columnist wrote in the Daily Tar Heel, UNC–Chapel Hill’s student newspa- per, that college was the time for young people to “sew” their wild oats, spell- ing the infinitive s-e-w. The troubling fact that the grad student was in history should be noted as well. In that same year, the actress Mary Frann—best known for her role as Bob Newhart’s wife on the TV show Newhart—died. In her New York Times obituary, a friend was quoted as saying that in the last few years before her death, Frann had had “a hard road to hoe.” Asphalt or concrete would prove quite difficult to hoe, I suppose.

Later in that same year, Auburn University changed the name of its Department of Agricultural Engineering to the Department of Biosystems Engineering. The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Auburn Seeks to Revamp Aggie Image” specifying the reasons for the name change. Accord- ing to the piece, the old name wasn’t very appealing to prospective students, who increasingly viewed agriculture in negative terms as “an unsophisticated, low-technology field.” When an institution such as Auburn—Alabama’s land-grant school since 1874—is embarrassed by its connection with farm- ing, you know agriculture is in trouble.1

Before quitting the 1990s, one last gem. I myself recall, ruefully, a break- fast gathering sponsored by the Agricultural History Society at a meeting in Chicago of the Organization of American Historians. The crowd at the meeting was modest. All ten or so of us in attendance were middle-aged or aged white males—although I promise I was not wearing a string tie like two or three others at the breakfast. Anyway, the meeting was going full bore (if you know what I mean) when two very chic, well-dressed young women slipped in and sat down at adjacent empty seats. They sat for about ten or fifteen minutes, listening politely to us old white guys, when one of them asked, again very politely, “Is this the Oral History Association breakfast?” Alas, we said no, and helpfully pointed them to a room across the hall and they were off, leaving us to gum the rest of our oatmeal and transact other difficult business in the manner in which we had long—too long—been accustomed.

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38 Peter A. Coclanis

As I suggested at the outset, however, over the last fifteen years or so things have changed—at least on the surface. Studying food has become hot. Work on agriculture and agricultural history has picked up, even though much of it relates not to the agricultural mainstream, but to fringe groups and movements, outliers and anomalies, alternative practices and traditions, and what is rather more environmental history than agricultural history per se. And although interest in agriculture has grown of late, there is still evidence out there that not everyone has gotten the message. In 2002 I was second reader on a senior honors thesis in history, the writer of which stated at one point that “in a capitalist society . . . one man weeps, the other sows.”2 At least he spelled sow s-o-w. A few years back one of my senior colleagues in history at UNC–Chapel Hill told me that he leaves farmers completely out of his U.S. History since 1865 survey because they interfere with his course’s narra- tive thrust; and historian Louis Ferleger has recently demonstrated that cov- erage of agriculture (particularly southern agriculture) is steadily decreasing in U.S. history texts. And in 2010, the American Farm Bureau Federation (a.k.a. the Farm Bureau), then in its ninety-first year of existence, sold off its web domain name, FB.com. Since the buyer was Facebook, and the price $8.5 million, we can perhaps cut the FB—the largest general farm organization in the United States—some slack.3 But no breaks for the historians!

So what is the upshot of these introductory remarks? Just a throat- clearing exercise or is there deeper intent? Although the author is never the sole arbiter of these things, I am opting for the latter interpretation. I started this piece by juxtaposing the rising interest in food, food studies, and certain epiphenomenal features of agriculture with some evidence regarding the lack of knowledge about or at times even interest in the basics of American agriculture. W hy? Because disarticulation of this sort has deleterious consequences, perhaps the most serious of which for our purposes relate to interpretative distortions of various kinds about American agriculture’s history, present condition, and future prospects. Not that the surging interest in food is a bad thing in and of itself, but without deeper grounding, the outgrowth of such interest, whether inten- tionally or unintentionally, can be misleading and result in serious misin- terpretation. In this regard the landscapes of Henri Rousseau, with their distortions in scale and perspective, are somewhat analogous: they are enriching, offering insights, but not closely related to material realities, to the facts on and in the ground, as it were.

With these points in mind, what I hope to do in this chapter is to make the case that despite the relative lack of interest today in normative

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http://FB.com

The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 39

dimensions of American agriculture or in core themes in American agri- cultural history, such topics are still important for many, many reasons. The most notable of these reasons is that America’s development into a postindustrial superpower, the world’s hyperpower to use a formulation the French like to throw around, has been inextricably connected to our country’s formidable record of success in the agricultural sector over the centuries. My argument comprises four parts. First, I’ll try to generalize a bit about the historical character of American agriculture and the principal factors responsible for the robust performance of the American agricul- tural sector over the past 350 or so years. The contours of American agri- culture, as it were. Second, I’ll present some historical data illustrating the long-term decline in the relative importance of the American agricultural sector. Third, I’ll make the case that despite its declining relative impor- tance the agricultural sector has proved central to American urbanization and industrialization, indeed, to the process of economic development more generally in the United States. Fourth, I’ll try to contextualize the (growing) place of alternative farming in the American agricultural system. In so doing I’ll spell out some of the impediments to its expansion and establish its proximate bounds and limits.

The readers of this volume all are interested in food and agriculture and likely have some degree of commitment to sustainable development. None- theless, it is important to recall now and then that even in our voluntaristic times there are a range of structural factors that circumscribe our actions, however well-intended, if at times unrealistic and, I believe, self-righteous they may be. In other words, then, with respect to food, Marx may have had it about right when he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”4

With these considerations in mind, let us turn to the subject at hand: the contours of American agriculture, so to speak. First, to the explanatory factors, or, more properly, sets of factors most responsible for our agricul- tural success over time. And here I’ll be adopting the rhetorical style of economics rather than history, that is, privileging analysis over narration, patterns over variations, and explanatory parsimony over thick description. W hen we employ this m.o., four categories of variables come immediately to mind in explaining our agricultural success over time: (1) resources; (2) markets; (3) sociocultural values; and (4) institutions. Generally speaking, all four categories of variables were extremely propitious for agricultural success throughout most of our history; taken together, the

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40 Peter A. Coclanis

patterning of these variables goes a long way toward explaining America’s position of power and preeminence in the world today.

America’s resource “endowment” has been exceptionally favorable for agricultural development throughout our history. With a huge inventory of fertile, well-watered, and varied land, a person-to-land ratio very condu- cive to productivity and prosperity, good access to financial capital most of the time, and a heterogeneous population mix—European, African, Native American, Asian—possessed of different and often complementary forms of proprietary knowledge about farming, America’s agricultural sector has generally been extremely well-positioned for farm-building, technological advance, and development.5

For much of our history, moreover, the conjuncture of supply and demand possibilities for most American agriculturalists has been conducive to growth. With markets widening and deepening in the West over the past three centuries as a result of increases in population and levels of urban- ization and wealth, improvements in transportation, storage, distribution, and communication, and the greater commercialization of human values, demand for American foodstuffs has generally been strong, not only domes- tically, but often internationally as well. It should be noted, moreover, that in recent decades much of the growth in international demand for American farm products has come from Asia. Even as Engel’s law began to kick in and American families spent a smaller percentage of their income on food when their incomes increased, American farmers were able to adjust by shifting their output mixes to varying degrees toward agricultural products of greater income elasticity (higher-quality meats, dairy products, and specialty fruits and vegetables).6 The result of the conjuncture of strong demand and Amer- ican farmers’ relatively elastic supply response—we shall outline some of the reasons for the elasticity of supply momentarily—has generally been a high-output, high-price equilibrium in American agriculture over sustained periods of time in U.S. history.7

The elasticity of agricultural supply in the United States has histori- cally been related closely to our last two categories of explanatory variables: sociocultural values and American institutions, both of which have helped to condition responsiveness to market signals and signs. From the time of initial colonization and settlement, American farmers, by and large, have been of an entrepreneurial bent and have responded pretty vigorously and in what conventional economists would refer to as rational ways to price sig- nals. There was seldom a backward-bending labor supply curve in American agriculture, and most American farmers have pursued utility-maximizing

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42 Peter A. Coclanis

industries is greater today than ever before, reaching an all-time high of $992 billion—5.5% of GDP—in 2015.9 What may be less clear, at least on the surface, however, is the manner in which agriculture has supported, underpinned, and reinforced urbanization, industrialization, and American development more generally even as farmers and farming have receded both from the fields themselves and from the American historical imagination.

There are, at the very least, four important ways in which agriculture has played a crucial role in shaping, if not conditioning or even determin- ing the pace and pattern of American economic expansion over the last few centuries.10 First, because of our favorable factor endowment and the steady stream of productivity gains in agriculture over time, food and fiber prices in America have generally been very low in comparative terms. As a result, Americans have traditionally spent a very modest proportion of disposable personal income on food—in 2014 the figure was less than 10%, with about 5.5% spent on food consumed at home, and another 4.3% on food consumed away from home. In percentage terms, Americans spend less of their incomes on food than almost any nation in the world. Most people in developed coun- tries spend twice as much in percentage terms, and in less-developed coun- tries (LDCs) four to eight times as much.11 For the United States, low food

Table 1. agriculTure’s share of u.s. labor force

Year Percent Ca. 1750 75–85 1800 74.40–83.30 1850 55 1900 40.02 1950 12.04 2016 1.37*

*Workers involved in crop production, animal production, and aquaculture Sources: Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 41; Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 57; Stanley Lebergott, The Americans: An Economic Record (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 66, Table 7.3; Thomas J. Weiss, “U.S. Labor Force Estimates and Economic Growth, 1800–1860,” in American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War, ed. Robert E. Gallman and John Joseph Wallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 19–78, esp. 22, Table 1.1; Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition, ed. Richard Sutch and Susan B. Carter, 5 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2:101, Table Ba652–669; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Household Data, Annual Averages,18b, Employed Persons by Industry and Age, last modified February 8, 2017, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18b.htm, accessed May 18, 2017.

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https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18b.htm,accessed

The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 43

Table 2. agriculTure’s share of u.s. gross DomesTic ProDucT

Year Percent 1800 46 1840 40 1870 33 1900 18 1930 8 1945 7 1970 2 2006 0.9 2012 1 2015 1

Sources: Marvin Towne and Wayne Rasmussen, “Farm Gross Output and Gross Investment in the Nineteenth Century,” in Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Parker, Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, National Bureau of Economic Research, vol. 24, Studies in Income and Wealth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), 255–312, esp. 265, Table 1, Farm Gross Product, Decade Years, 1800–1900; Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition, ed. Richard Sutch and Susan B. Carter, 5 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3: 23–28, Table ca9–19, Gross Domestic Product: 1790–2002, esp. 23; Robert E. Gallman, “Economic Growth and Structural Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, 3 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996–2000), 2 (2000): 1–55, esp. 50, Table I.14, The Sectoral Distribution of GNP 1840–1900; Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Efflund, and Neilson Conklin, The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Economic Information Bulletin, Number 3, June 2005 (Washington, D.C.: 2005), 2; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Chart Gallery, What is Agriculture’s Share of the Overall U.S. Economy?, November 25, 2014, http://www.ers.usda.gov/data- products/chart-gallery/detail.aspx?chartId=40037&embed=True, accessed January 20, 2015; “Agricultural Output Climbed in 2013, Recovering from Drought,” New York Times, June 20, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/business/economy/after- a-drought-agriculture-climbs.html?_r=0, accessed June 30, 2015; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Ag and Food Sectors and the Economy [2015], https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting- the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx, last updated May 5, 2017, accessed May 18, 2017. The author would like to thank Paul W. Rhode of the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan for help in calculating the estimate for 1800.

costs mean that a large proportion of American income is “freed” for other uses, whether for consumption of manufactured goods and services, leisure activities, or investment of one type or another. To be sure, some would argue that this percentage is too low, that negative externalities need to be factored in via environmental accounting, but I assure you, almost every other country in the world would love to start with our alleged problem.

pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/detail.aspx?chartId=40037&embed=True

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/business/economy/after-a-drought-agriculture-climbs.html?_r=0

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx

44 Peter A. Coclanis

Second, because many of the productivity gains in America have been labor-saving (whether through mechanization or productivity-enhancing biological inputs such as improved seeds, herbicides, and pesticides), many workers were rendered redundant relatively early on in the agricultural sec- tor. Although this often posed assorted short-term traumas and difficulties for the affected workers themselves, technological change of this sort helped create the labor pool necessary for America’s massive industrialization pro- cess between 1850 and about 1960.

Third, the agricultural sector has proven to be a strong source of demand for American industrial goods over time. Indeed, many urban factories across the United States have kept busy producing machinery, implements, tools, biological inputs, and transport, storage, and distribution facilities deployed in/for the farm sector.

Finally, another huge part of the U.S. manufacturing sector has tra- ditionally been involved in the processing of food and fiber produced on American farms. Many of our biggest industries, historically and even today— meatpacking, other food products, textiles, paper and pulp, liquor and alcohol, leather, and so on—are all essentially processing industries for raw materials produced in America’s farm sector.

If the American experience reveals anything at all about the general process of economic development, it has, in fact, been the importance of the linkage, the organic interaction, as it were, between the urban and rural sectors, between factories and fields. In no place was this truer, historically, than in the so-called manufacturing belt of the United States: broadly speak- ing, the northeastern quadrant of the United States (the area east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio River). In this region, commercial, agriculture developed simultaneously with cities and manufacturing. Over time, as agriculture developed (sending agricultural surpluses to the region’s villages, towns, and cities), the urban centers and factories in the region began to supersede outside suppliers of manufactures to meet the needs of the region’s increasingly prosperous farmers as well as other denizens in the region. Moreover, as the region’s farmers and manufacturers improved in productivity and grew in scale over time, they themselves began to export their products successfully to other parts of the United States and abroad. In so doing, this process brought sustained prosperity to the region as a whole, creating what has sometimes been referred to as our agro-industrial complex. The agro-industrial complex, once created, spread to the Great Plains, before jumping to California, a state that in agricultural terms drew inspiration

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The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 45

from—and in many ways came to resemble—Iowa and other midwestern states for a considerable period of time.

For a century and a half this growing complex was the envy of the world and in some ways still is. If the experience of the manufacturing belt was not exactly a textbook case of what some development experts today call Agri- cultural Development-Led Industrialization (ADLI), it was at the very least an example of a “virtuous economic circle” established through the simul- taneous and balanced interactions between market agriculture and regional urban and industrial constellations.

The case of the U.S. manufacturing belt, and, to some extent, the case of America more generally, should give pause to historians, economists, and planners devising developmental strategies even today. The position of agriculture may no longer be as visible here as it once was, but without a prosperous rural sector—which in my view itself depends on a stable insti- tutional setting with enforceable property rights—sustained and sustainable industrialization, let alone development anywhere will be less a reality than a hope and a dream.12 It is a hopeful sign, then, that over the past few years, two of the world’s most powerful forces—the World Bank (whose 2008 devel- opment report focused on agriculture) and the Gates Foundation—have in the first case rediscovered agriculture and in the second case started paying systematic attention to it for the first time.13

Now let us situate alternative agriculture and what some call the L-O-S movement—local, organic, and slow—in this historical context. In order to do so, let me start, perhaps a bit counterintuitively, by reiterating and reemphasizing the close historical relationship in America between agricul- ture and industry. Indeed, if we take our cue from historians of technology and define industrialization broadly—and not equate it with machines or even with manufacturing—what we need to focus on is a particular way of thinking about and acting in the material world. Conceived in such terms, industrialization can profitably be defined as the achievement and institu- tionalization of historically high rates of productivity through the systematic employment of scientific knowledge to transform the material environ- ment into a flow of economically useful goods and services.14 Over time, the employment of such knowledge in the material world has led to drastic increases in economic productivity (the relationship of inputs to output), which is the key to growth and development. Note also that when industri- alization is conceived of in this way, one can talk without contradiction of industrial agriculture emerging simultaneously with—or even as a precursor

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The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 41

(if not profit-maximizing) strategies with method and vigor whenever possible. In so doing, they have been helped by the institutional frame- work in which they found themselves embedded: a framework, that is to say, informed by strong legal support for contracts, private property, and individual liberties and freedoms, and concerted governmental support for prodevelopmental policies, broadly conceived (including agricultural research and infrastructure). Indeed, the entire institutional apparatus in America—constitutional arrangements, property laws, court decisions, governmental fiscal and monetary policies, efficiency-enhancing levels of regulation, and so on—has proven hospitable to bold developmental ini- tiatives by farmer-entrepreneurs (nascent agribusiness people) across the United States.

In America, then, we find enterprising farmers with adequate farm finance situated on fertile, but relatively inexpensive land, operating for the most part in a favorable market environment with strong institutional support from the legal system and political/governmental order. Such farmers were aided over time by increasingly taut supply chains marked by ever- improving logistical systems and storage/processing facilities, and by increasingly sophisticated financial/insurance mechanisms, the last of which served important risk-reduction and income-smoothing functions.8 In such an economic and institutional climate, it is not surprising that American farmers have been extraordinarily productive over time, regu- larly bringing in impressive “harvests” of marketable crops and livestock via increasingly efficient means. In so doing, they have enriched themselves, gratified consumers, and greatly facilitated the economic development of the United States. Even when taking into consideration the negative exter- nalities associated with agriculture—ground and water pollution, aquifer depletion, and so forth—one cannot gainsay the fact that over the centuries the performance of the farm sector on balance has proved a terrific boon to the United States.

The startling changes in the role and position of America’s agricultural sector over time are captured well in some data, arrayed in tables 1 and 2, on agriculture’s share of the American labor force and agriculture’s share of U.S. domestic product. Although these data are rough, they do establish some broad levels of magnitude.

As these data demonstrate, agriculture’s share of both the labor force and gross domestic product has declined dramatically over the past two centuries. Of course, in absolute terms—whether measured in dollars or in sheer quantity—the market value of agriculture, food, and related

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42 Peter A. Coclanis

Table 1. agriculTure’s share of u.s. labor force

Year Percent Ca. 1750 75–85 1800 74.40–83.30 1850 55 1900 40.02 1950 12.04 2016 1.37*

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https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18b.htm,accessed

The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 43

Table 2. agriculTure’s share of u.s. gross DomesTic ProDucT

Year Percent 1800 46 1840 40 1870 33 1900 18 1930 8 1945 7 1970 2 2006 0.9 2012 1 2015 1

pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/detail.aspx?chartId=40037&embed=True

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/business/economy/after-a-drought-agriculture-climbs.html?_r=0

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx

44 Peter A. Coclanis

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The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 45

from—and in many ways came to resemble—Iowa and other midwestern states for a considerable period of time.

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46 Peter A. Coclanis

of and catalyst for—the changes in mining and manufacturing technology typically associated with the so-called Industrial Revolution.15

In America we can see the roots of industrial agriculture centuries ago. Indeed, the industrialization of our economy as a whole began early on, and the various sectors over time have shared many of the same character- istics. For example, the first “big business” in America, as Alfred D. Chan- dler Jr. pointed out long ago, was the southern plantation, and many of the organizational and managerial strategies and structures developed on large plantations—specialization, division of labor, scale economies, middle man- agement positions, consolidated accounting—were adopted and refined in the manufacturing sector later in the nineteenth century.16 Abstracting a bit, it is undeniable that America’s most original historical contributions to production technology over time have involved large units, and the efficient, capital-intensive mass production of standardized products of low/average quality at cheap prices. This is so whether we are talking about the produc- tion of milling machines in New England in the early nineteenth century or cotton production in the antebellum South, or about the “disassembly” lines in the Cincinnati and Chicago meatpacking industries in the second half of the nineteenth century, wheat production on the bonanza farms of North Dakota in the 1880s and 1890s, or Model Ts at Henry Ford’s plant in High- land Park, Michigan, in 1914.17 Or about the labor-deskilling innovations in meatpacking introduced in the Midwest in the 1980s by IBP (now Tyson Fresh Meats), the bête noire of labor unions, or about the “assembly” of food at Taco Bell, Applebee’s, or Mickey D’s.18 What we traditionally do well is bulk not batch, quick not slow, cheap not luxury, big box not boutique. Our “industrial agricultural” system today involves much the same thing, to the chagrin of Eric Schlosser, Morgan Spurlock, Michael Pollan, Ted Genoways, and Barry Estabrook—and to the pocketbook advantage, if not delight, of many hard-pressed consumers at home and abroad.

Now why do I pay so much attention to these matters in a section of a chapter ostensibly devoted to alternative agricultures and L-O-S? Simply put, in order to get readers to think realistically about food politics—politics in a Bismarckian sense as “the art of the possible.” To underscore this point, let’s do the numbers, as Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal might say. While boutique farms and farmettes are all the rage with food romantics, the mean size of an American farm in 2012 was 434 acres (168 in my home state of North Caro- lina).19 Size and scale matter in American agriculture. Over 64% of cropland harvested is produced on farms of over one thousand acres, and almost 80% on farms of five hundred acres or more.20 The vast majority of American

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The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 47

farms make little difference in the marketplace. The smallest 75% of farmers accounted for only 3% of the value of agricultural products sold in 2012, with 97% of farm sales in that year coming from the largest 25%. And that’s not the half of it. The largest 4% accounted for 66% of the total value of agricultural output in 2012, with the top 0.5% alone accounting for 32%.21

The small farmers at my local farmers market notwithstanding, boutique farms are in the aggregate pretty much irrelevant to American agriculture as a whole. Most small farmers today derive very little income from agriculture, in any case: almost all income of so-called “farm” households actually comes from nonfarm employment of one kind or another. Indeed, even consider- ing all farmers in America—that is, even including large ones—on average only 11% of household income for farm families in 2010 was estimated by the USDA to come from agriculture.22 Without the largest farms, in other words, America doesn’t really have a significant commercial agricultural sec- tor, certainly not one capable of both feeding the U.S. population affordably and exporting over $135 billion worth of agricultural products in calendar year 2016, near our greatest total ever.23 So while I’m really not trying here to channel Earl Butz, who as U.S. secretary of agriculture in the 1970s famously challenged American farmers to “get big or get out,” I am trying to inject a much-needed dose of realism into debates over farming in this country.

While many of us in North Carolina are enamored of our farmers mar- kets, our custom producers, and our CSAs, what the Old North State is important for, agriculturally speaking, is its pioneering factory hog farms (“hog integrators”) and being among the nation’s leaders not only in hog pro- duction (#2), but also in the production of tobacco (#1), sweet potatoes (#2), poultry and eggs (#2), turkeys (#3), Christmas trees, and cucumbers; it’s a leading producer of strawberries, bell peppers, upland cotton, and broiler chickens as well.24 North Carolina is also important for being the site of the Open Grounds Farm, which I doubt that many readers of this piece have heard of. This low-profile, Italian-owned farm in Carteret County near the coast produces huge quantities of corn, soybeans, and winter wheat, and at roughly fifty-seven thousand acres in size is the largest farm east of the Mis- sissippi River.25 Again, who would have thunk it?

At this point, some readers might be asking what about organic agri- culture? To be sure, the sector has grown rapidly since the 1980s, albeit from an infinitesimal base, and organic farmers on average are younger than farmers practicing conventional agriculture. But in a macro sense organic agriculture even today comprises a tiny share of American agriculture and is of only marginal importance to most Americans. To be more specific,

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according to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistical Service, organic food accounted for about 5.5% of the total value of agricultural sales in the United States in 2014.26

And from my perspective, it’s not a bad thing that the organic sector is tiny, because if it grew much larger it would not only raise food costs and reduce the overall efficiency of the agriculture sector but would also lead to potentially catastrophic environmental problems. As the distinguished agricultural expert Robert Paarlberg of Wellesley College pointed out in 2010 in an influential article in the journal Foreign Policy, a complete switch-over to organic agriculture would be nothing short of disastrous.27 To replace the synthetic nitrogenous fertilizer currently used on American farms with “natural” organic fertilizer, we’d have to increase the U.S. cattle stock fivefold. If these animals were raised on organic forage, we’d have to convert much of the land in the lower forty-eight states to pasture. Because the yield of organic field crops is generally much lower on average than nonorganics—studies published in journals such as Nature and Science and data compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture put the shortfall at between 5% and 38% for various crops under different tillage conditions—much more land would have to be converted to crops.28

Paarlberg estimates that if Europe tried to feed itself organically, it would need an additional 28 million hectares (one hectare is equal to 2.47 acres) of cropland—69 million acres—equal, in his words, “to all the remaining for- est cover in France, Germany, Britain, and Denmark combined.” And why? Probably not for nutritional purposes. Although one can certainly find stud- ies proclaiming the nutritional superiority of organic food, the most compre- hensive study ever done on this subject was published in 2010 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. In this study the research team conducted a “sys- tematic review” of studies done over the past fifty years on the health benefits of organics, finding no nutritional advantage of organics over conventionally grown food. Other studies, including studies done by the Mayo Clinic and by Stanford University researchers, largely concur.29 Moreover, according to the FDA, even the highest dietary exposures to pesticide residues found on foods grown conventionally in the United States are so small—less than one one-thousandth of toxicity levels—that the purported safety gains from buying organic are trivial. To be sure, exposure to pesticides remains a seri- ous problem in the LDCs, where pesticide use is not well regulated, but, according to Paarlberg, even there the problem is mainly for the unprotected sprayers rather than for consumers.30

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Ironically, if organics ever become a major commercial presence in the United States, it will likely be due to “big box” stores, including Walmart, the bugbear of food snobs everywhere. In a highly publicized move a few years back, the Bentonville behemoth made a commitment to ramp up its organic offerings and to sell them at reasonable prices. Mon dieu! It is now one of the largest sellers of organics in the United States—either first or second behind Costco—but we’ll have to wait and see what the future holds.31

And what about the production of meat in small-scale, nonindustrial settings? According to a piece a few years back by James E. McWilliams—a vegan critic of both meat-eating and industrial agriculture—this is a non- starter too, for the negative environmental impact of small-scale production is even greater (particularly regarding global warming), small-scale produc- tion is not necessarily “more natural,” and the economics of small-scale pro- duction are untenable.32

In the face of all this, people like Michael Pollan still want us to go local and organic. In 2010 he upset even some of his fans when he put some specific numbers behind his “pay more, eat less” mantra, and stated that we should be willing to pay $8 for a dozen eggs and $3.90 for a pound of peaches!33 Numbers like that make me wonder just what type of organic output Pollan is ingesting!

In 2006 Dave Eggers published an interesting novel titled What Is the What, which leads me to ask of Pollan, who is the “we”? In a country wherein the median income has basically been stagnant for thirty years—where, in 2015, 13.5% of the population (43.1 million people) was living beneath the poverty line—just who does he mean?34 In this regard, it is worth not- ing as well that over the past twenty-five years, the bottom quintile (20%) of households has spent between 29% and 46% of household income on food.35 In unsettled times like this, many, if not most, Americans are thank- ful that this country’s food—produced industrially—is so cheap, at least at Walmart, Costco, Lidl, and Aldi, if not at Whole Foods. Most of the world’s population would relish the opportunity of dealing with the problem of food that is too cheap.

Now I’m being intentionally provocative here. There are many problems with what some call scientism, and with the type of top-down technocratic approaches—what James Scott calls “high modernism”—that have shaped our industrial agricultural system over time.36 I don’t particularly like the way that chickens are raised either, for example. And in this regard I am certainly joined by many other Americans. Indeed, in this volume, Steve Striffler has

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carefully laid out both the calls for reform and the outright opposition that industrial agriculture have often occasioned. But the answer is not to apothe- osize preindustrial agriculture and to sanctify local-organic-slow regimes, as Ken Albala seems to do in his contribution to this volume, but to improve and render more humane our industrial agricultural system (which is cur- rently being done, by the way). You want local, organic, and slow? The closest thing to that regime in the world, as Paarlberg points out, is that prevalent in Africa, the least productive agricultural regime in the world, a place whose largely L-O-S regime hasn’t been able to feed its population of a billion peo- ple in decades.37

No, the answer in my view is not boutique L-O-S agriculture—however beneficial to small, well-heeled populations and to gentleman farmers–cum– Jefferson lecturers such as Wendell Berry—but rather a better, more egali- tarian and accommodating industrial regime, one still predicated on high technology and the systematic employment in the agricultural realm of the best scientific knowledge.38 Over the past fifty years developments in this regime have brought us not only the Green Revolution, which allowed the world to cope with massive increases in population in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but also, more recently, impressive biological innovations (GMOs, most notably), and so-called precision farming—with “no-till” planting, drip irrigation, advanced agricultural analytics, GPS/sensor systems for chemical dispensing, and so on—that together have significantly reduced farming’s environmental footprint. The OECD’s 2008 review of the “envi- ronmental performance of agriculture” in the world’s thirty most advanced countries—the countries characterized most by capital-intensive, high- tech agriculture—demonstrates that production had grown substantially between 1990 and 2004, while negative environmental impacts had fallen in every category and biodiversity had increased. And subsequent updates have shown that progress has continued since that time.39 And many other studies have demonstrated that the food systems of the OECD countries are the safest in the history of the world, whatever people such as Mark Bittman would have us believe. As I pointed out in a piece in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, in this country one’s chances of dying from ingesting bad food or water at an individual “eating event” is about 1 in 125 million: pretty good odds, it seems to me.40

The biggest food, agriculture, and sustainable development problem we will face over the next two generations is not that posed by bad food, cheap food, excessive food-miles, or the horrors of HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup)—oops, corn sugar—although each of these poses formidable

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challenges in its own way. The biggest problem, as the FAO, the UNDP, and other international agencies know well, is somehow finding a way to feed the roughly 9.7 billion people who will be living on earth in 2050—a third more than are living on earth today—on less land, worse land, with less water, fewer herbicides and pesticides, and almost certainly in a higher- temperature climatic regime. The fact that this population, on balance, will be wealthier and likely demand more foods of higher income elasticities (meats, dairy products, and the like) will make the above challenge even greater.41 Clearly, many adjustments will have to be made—changes in diet, and reductions in food waste come immediately to mind—if we are to be food secure in 2050. But in my view food security will come about—if it does come about—mainly via the continued development of high- technology, scientific, industrial agriculture, which will certainly include GMOs, gene editing through techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9, synthetic biology, and microbiomes, among other things.42 The fact that there is at least some possibility that in the future industrial agriculture will literally be sited in factories— European and American biotech companies are currently exper- imenting with lab-grown meat and milk—adds a mordant, even sardonic twist to things. Although the last scenario isn’t all that appealing on the surface—even to me—the African adage “Human rights begin with break- fast” trumps aesthetics, especially if nutritious lab-produced food uses fewer resources and is priced cheaply.43

One must, of course, always be wary of the exaggerated claims often associated with new technology, scientific “breakthroughs,” and so on—as Margaret Mellon makes clear in her insightful essay in this volume—but, as an economic historian, I ask where precisely would we be today without earlier episodes of “scientific progress” in agriculture? Without irrigation? Without crop rotation and clover? Without the Mendelian revolution? Without hybrids? Without Haber-Bosch? And, in my view, without GMOs, gene editing, and the like? Where? Simply put, L-O-S, or, more to the point, LOST! It is possible, of course, that in the future we might be able to bring together in more significant ways GMOs and organics—as Pamela C. Ron- ald and Raoul W. Adamchak have provocatively proposed—but, if it hap- pens, it will for the most part be scientific progress that will bring such a melding about.44

Notwithstanding the above considerations, in late October 2010 a major private research university in Durham, North Carolina, celebrated “Food Week,” but found no place on the program for issues relating to the need to increase food production or for any consideration of mainstream

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agriculture per se. The program found time for a Duke Iron Chef 2010 com- petition, using pumpkins and “sustainable ingredients,” but no place for discussions of the pros and cons of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds (or of glyphosates, for that matter) or of so-called golden rice, enriched with beta- carotene (vitamin A).

Hope springs eternal and is sometimes rewarded. In February 2012 another food conference was held in the Triangle area—“Shared Tables”— that included a bit more balance regarding speakers and perspectives. To be sure, its promotional materials also included a precious recipe for “rosemary garlic goat cheese scones,” and after the festivities the conference website included the following self-righteous and self-indulgent proclamation: “The conference also had a practical impact on the environment as we composted a total of 16.5 bags of waste, while only sending 4 bags of garbage to the land- fill. Additionally, many attendees utilized public transportation, and carbon offsets were purchased for those who travelled to attend.” Let’s give it up for the Triangle’s bourgeoisie!45

And then there are events like the conference out of which this volume grew—dealing with serious issues relating to food in an open way, no decks stacked, no party line, no PC. Which is as it should be for food systems are so complex that multi- and cross-disciplinary approaches, a variety of perspectives, and, above all, balance and realism—a sense of the possible— are needed if real progress is to be made regarding the challenges ahead. Thus, essays in this volume by scholars with views so different as Striffler and Mellon, on the one hand, and yours truly, on the other. In essence, then, what I’m getting at here is that while we must acknowledge the important contributions made by people such as Alice Waters, Marion Nestle, and, yes, Michael Pollan, we must acknowledge too that we live in a world of cheese fries and flavor-blasted Doritos, of Roundup, of GMOs, and, if I had my way, of DDT.46 And a world, I can’t help but point out, wherein a recent, well-crafted survey found that about 80% of Americans surveyed support “mandatory labels on food containing DNA.”47 Go for it.

Another case in point: Clearly, it is important to note that a small pro- portion of American adults are vegetarians or vegans: 3%, according to a 2008 report in Vegetarian Times, and 7%, according to a 2012 survey conducted by Gallup. Fair enough, but it is also important to remember that the other 93–97% eat meat.48 While there is a place in our world for edible school- yards, for locavores, for food purists, and, yes, for food snobs, there should be places, too, for the pretty good and even for the not-so-good, especially when reasonably priced. In other words, places for the expanding French

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(semi-fast-food) café/bakery chain Paul, for In-N-Out Burger, and even for the much-criticized Hostess Twinkie, which, after a brief absence from the market, returned with a splash in 2013.49

The food world is complicated, in other words. W ho in 2017 hasn’t heard the story of Jared Fogel, the (in)famous and now-imprisoned Subway Guy? How else can one explain the fact that in 2010 a college professor— indeed, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University—spent two months on a “convenience store” diet composed for the most part of Oreos, Doritos, and Twinkies, and in so doing lost twenty-seven pounds, improved his health, and got his BMI down to the normal range? Or the Iowa science teacher who in 2013 lost thirty-seven pounds and saw his cholesterol level drop significantly after eating nothing but McDonald’s food for three months? Or consider the robust health and physical stature of former UNC football star Bruce Carter, now on the New York Jets, who, according to ESPN Magazine in 2010 was arguably the most gifted athlete in college football, a player with a “freakish” physique: at 6 foot 3, 235 pounds, with 2% body fat, he ran 40 yards in 4.39 seconds, had a 40.5-inch vertical leap, and bench pressed 440 pounds. Carter himself attributed his prowess in large part to Mickey D’s. “I eat a lot of McDonald’s and fast foods . . . [al]most every day. I usually get three double cheeseburgers, medium fries, large tea, and six-piece McNuggets. I don’t think eating healthy as far as eating salads and that stuff really works for me.” Or the fact that Usain Bolt stated in his autobiography that he ate approximately one thousand Chicken McNuggets while in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, where he won gold medals in both the 100- and 200-meter races and a third in the 4-by-100-meter relay? How does one explain examples such as these with- out acknowledging that food and food systems are complex subjects of inquiry?50

Yes, yes, I know that, generally speaking, too much fast food is strongly and positively correlated with “markers” of poor health such as obesity and high BMIs, and also with diabetes, elevated blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, incidence of strokes, and so on. But I also know that the fast food, which is “energy-dense,” as nutritionists say, provides a considerable caloric bang for a buck. “Dollar meals” may not appeal much to affluent consumers, but to groups further down the food chain, as it were, they hit the spot. To be sure, too many dollar meals may lead to health problems down the line, but, in economics lingo, the “pure time preference” for poor people is the present. They have every right to apply heavy discount rates to the future, which may not be all that great in any case.51

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As I said, things are complicated. And we haven’t even mentioned the Farm Bill, decried if not despised by the food police, even though 80% of the outlays in the 2014 iteration (PL 113-79), which ran through 2018, went to nutrition-assistance programs of one kind or another, most notably SNAP, formerly known as food stamps.52 As Sarah Ludington points out in her article (chapter 8), those are precisely the same reasons that economic liber- tarians and social conservatives also despise the Farm Bill. Nor have we men- tioned the recent questions raised about—and powerful challenges made to—narratives regarding “food deserts” in America’s inner cities.53 Those are difficult subjects, too, but subjects better tackled another day.

Notes

1. See Peter A. Coclanis, “Agriculture as History,” Historically Speaking 4 (November 2002): 3–4.

2. Robert Vic, “The Portland Canal” (senior honors thesis, history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002), 54.

3. Louis A. Ferleger, “Agriculture’s Last Stand: A Note on the Missing South,” Journal of the Historical Society 12 (March 2012): 97–106; Leslie Horn, “Facebook Dropped $8.5M for FB.com,” PC Magazine.com, 12 January 2011, http://www.pcmag.com/ article2/0,2817,2375643,00.asp.

4. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (New York: International Publishers, 1964; originally published in German in 1852), 15.

5. On the mixed, “mestizo” character of early American agriculture and the important contributions made by various groups, see, for example, Russell R . Menard, “Colonial America’s Mestizo Agriculture,” in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 107–23.

6. This observation, named after nineteenth-century German statistician Ernst Engel, states that, after income rises above subsistence levels, the relative proportion spent on food rises more slowly than income. Data on demand and income elasticities for food around the world in the contemporary era can be found in Andrew Muhammad, James L. Seale Jr., Birgit Meade, and Anita Regmi, International Evidence on Food Consumption Patterns: An Update Using 2005 International Comparison Program Data, TB-1929, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, March 2011, revised February 2013, http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/129561/tb1929.pdf.

7. My interpretation of U.S. agricultural history is based on a lifetime of studying the topic. For excellent surveys of American agriculture and its history, see, for example, R . Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History, rev. ed. (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2002); Bruce L. Gardner, American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). For classic analytical treatments, see William M. Parker, “Agriculture,” in American Economic Growth: An Economist’s History of the United States, ed. Lance E. Davis et al. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 369–417; Willard W. Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

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http://FB.com

http://Magazine.com

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375643,00.asp

http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/129561/tb1929.pdf

The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 55

8. Hurt, American Agriculture; Gardner, American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century; Parker, “Agriculture”; and Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture.

9. See U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Ag and Food Sectors and the Economy (Washington, D.C.: USDA, 2015, last updated 5 May 2017), https://www .ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food- sectors-and-the-economy.aspx.

10. See Parker, “Agriculture,” 372–75. 11. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Food Prices and

Spending (Washington, D.C.: USDA, 2014, last updated 25 April 2017), https://www .ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices- and-spending/; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Food Expenditure Series, last updated 1 December 2014, Table 7, Table 97, http://www.ers .usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures.aspx. Note that table 97 is titled “Percent of Consumer Expenditures Spent on Food, Alcoholic Beverages, and Tobacco That Were Consumed at Home, by Selected Countries, 2013.”

12. For a brief introduction to ADLI, see United Nations Economic and Social Council, “The Agricultural Development Led Industrialization (ADLI) Strategy,” Development Strategies That Work series (2010), http://webapps01.un.org/nvp/indpolicy .action?id=124, accessed 17 January 2015. On agriculture’s role in the development of the U.S. manufacturing belt, see, for example, Brian Page and Richard Walker, “From Settlement to Fordism: The Agro-Industrial Revolution in the American Midwest,” Economic Geography 67 (October 1991): 281–315.

13. See World Bank, World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2007). For an introduction to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s agricultural development programs, see http://www.gatesfoundation.org/ What-We-Do/Global-Development/Agricultural-Development, accessed 17 January 2015.

14. On this broad usage, see, for example, Nathan Rosenberg, Technology and American Economic Growth (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 1–24.

15. On the importance of revolutionary breakthroughs in agricultural history, see, for example, Peter A. Coclanis, “Two Cheers for Revolution: The Virtues of Regime Change in World Agriculture,” Historically Speaking 10 ( June 2009): 2–7.

16. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 64–67. Note that Caitlin Rosenthal has recently argued that southern plantations were much more “modern” in terms of business strategy and practices than Chandler believed. See, for example, Rosenthal, “From Memory to Mastery: Accounting for Control in America, 1750–1880,” Enterprise and Society 14 (December 2013): 732–48; Rosenthal (interviewed by Scott Berinato), “Plantations Practiced Modern Management,” Harvard Business Review 91 (September 2013): 30–31; Rosenthal, “Slavery’s Scientific Management: Masters and Managers,” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rothman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 62–86.

17. On the evolution of the U.S. manufacturing “regime,” see, for example, David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

18. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), esp. 149–90; Karl Taro Greenfeld, “Taco Bell and the Golden

pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures.aspx

http://webapps01.un.org/nvp/indpolicy.action?id=124

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Agricultural-Development

56 Peter A. Coclanis

Age of Drive-Thru,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 5 May 2011, http://www.businessweek.com/ magazine/content/11_20/b4228064581642.htm; Ilya Leybovich, “What Manufacturers Can Learn from Fast Food,” IMT: Industry Market Trends, 24 May 2011, http://news .thomasnet.com/imt/2011/05/24/what-manufacturers-can-learn-from-fast-food. For a provocative new critique of factory meat production—focusing on Hormel Foods and Spam—see Ted Genoways, The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).

19. U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2012 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, chapter 1, U.S. National Level Data, Table 64, Summary by Size of Farm: 2012, http://www.agcensus .usda.gov/Publications/2012/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_001_001 .pdf, accessed 25 November 2018; U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2012 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, chapter 1, State Level Data [North Carolina], Table 1: Historical Highlights: 2012 and Earlier Census Years, http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/ Publications/2012/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_State_Level/North_Carolina/ st37_1_001_001.pdf, accessed 18 January 2015. Note that by 2015 the average-size farm in North Carolina had grown to 170 acres. Note, too, that between 2011 and 2015 the number of farms in North Carolina fell from 50,800 to 48,800. See U.S. National Agricultural Statistics Service and the N.C. Department of Commerce and Consumer Services, North Carolina Agricultural Statistics 2016 (Raleigh, 2016), 10.

20. U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2012 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, chapter 1, U.S. National Level Data, Table 9, Land in Farms, Harvested Cropland, and Irrigated Land, by Size of Farm: 2012 and 2007, http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/ Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_009_010.pdf, accessed 18 January 2015. Note that the U.S. Census of Agriculture is taken every five years, the last in 2012. Questionnaires for the 2017 census will be mailed out in December 2017, and the results for the 2017 census will begin to be released in February 2019. See U.S. Department of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture, https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Help/FAQs/2017/, accessed 18 May 2017.

21. U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2012 Census Highlights, Farm Economics, ACH12-2, May 2014, http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/ Highlights/Farm_Economics/.

22. William Neuman, “Strong Exports Lift U.S. Agriculture Sector,” New York Times, 1 September 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/business/economy/01exports .html?_r=0.

23. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, Value of U.S. Agricultural Exports, 1990–2016, https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/value-us-agricultural- exports-1990–2016, accessed 18 May 2017. Note that in 2014 the value of U.S. agricultural exports peaked at about $150 billion. The strong dollar, lower prices for commodities, and increased international competition all played roles in the modest U.S. decline since 2014.

24. U.S. National Agricultural Statistics Service and the N.C. Department of Commerce and Consumer Services, North Carolina Agricultural Statistics 2016, 9; U.S. National Agricultural Statistics Service and the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, North Carolina Agricultural Statistics 2013 (Raleigh, 2013), 9; North Carolina Agricultural Statistics 2011 (Raleigh, 2011), 11.

25. For a good overview of the Open Grounds Farm, see Edward Martin, “High- Yield Investment,” Business North Carolina, 12 January 2012, http://businessnc.com/ high-yield-investmentcategory/.

pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_20/b4228064581642.htm

http://news.thomasnet.com/imt/2011/05/24/what-manufacturers-can-learn-from-fast-food

http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Full_Report/Volume_1

http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_009_010.pdf

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http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Farm_Economics/

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The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 57

26. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Organic Farming : Results from the 2014 Organic Survey (ACH12-29/September 2015), 2, https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/ Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Organics/2014_Organic_Survey_ Highlights.pdf, accessed 19 May 2017.

27. Robert Paarlberg, “Attention Whole Foods Shoppers,” Foreign Policy, May/June 2010, http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/04/26/attention-whole-foods-shoppers/.

28. Of the differential in yields between conventional and organic farming, see, for example, Paul Maeder et al., “Soil Fertility and Biodiversity in Organic Farming,” Science 296 (31 May 2002): 1694–97; Verena Seufert, Navin Ramankutty, and Jonathan A. Foley, “Comparing the Yields of Organic and Conventional Agriculture,” Nature 485 (10 May 2012): 229–32; Jayson Lusk, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate (New York: Crown Forum, 2013), 92–93, 209.

29. Alan D. Dangour, Karen Lock, Arabella Hayter, Andrea Aikenhead, Elizabeth Allen, and Ricardo Uauy, “Nutrition-Related Health Effects of Organic Foods: A Systematic Review,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 92 ( July 2010): 203–10, http://ajcn .nutrition.org/content/92/1/203.long; Paarlberg, “Attention Whole Foods Shoppers”; Crystal Smith-Spangler et al., “Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives? A Systematic Review,” Annals of Internal Medicine 157 (4 September 2012): 348–66, http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1355685. Note that even those studies arguing for the nutritional superiority of organic food generally find only modest nutritional differences between organics and nonorganics.

30. Paarlberg, “Attention Whole Foods Shoppers.” See also Lusk, The Food Police, 81–99. 31. See Andrew Martin, “Walmart Promises Organic Food for Everyone,” Bloomberg

Businessweek, 6 November 2014, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-06/ wal-mart-promises-organic-food-for-everyone; Angel González, “Largest Organic Grocer Now Costco, Analysts Say,” Seattle Times, 4 April 2016.

32. James E. McWilliams, “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” New York Times, 13 April 2012, A23. For a recent defense of meat production and its sustainability, see Nicolette Hahn Niman, Defending Beef: A Case for Sustainable Meat Production (W hite River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2014). Note that McWilliams is quite critical of the foodie fetish for localism. See McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (New York: Little, Brown, 2009). For a very spirited critique of food localism and locavores, see Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet (New York: Public Affairs, 2012).

33. Ben Worthen, “A Dozen Eggs for $8? Michael Pollan Explains the Math of Buying Local,” Wall Street Journal, 5 August 2010. See also Virginia Postrell, “No Free Locavore Lunch,” Wall Street Journal, 25–26 September 2010, C10; Ronald Bailey, “Chipotle Treats Customers Like Idiots,” Reason 47 (August/September 2015): 16–17.

34. U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015, by Bernadette D. Proctor, Jessica L. Semega, and Melissa A. Kollar, 13 September 2016, Report Number P60-256, https://www.census.gov/library/ publications/2016/demo/p60-256.html.

35. See U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, “Percent of Income Spent on Food Falls as Income Rises,” by Charlotte Tuttle and Annemarie Kuhns, Amber Waves, 6 September 2016, https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/ september/percent-of-income-spent-on-food-falls-as-income-rises/.

pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Organics/2014_Organic_Survey_Highlights.pdf

http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/04/26/attention-whole-foods-shoppers/

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/92/1/203.long

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1355685

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-06/wal-mart-promises-organic-food-for-everyone

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-256.html

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/september/percent-of-income-spent-on-food-falls-as-income-rises/

58 Peter A. Coclanis

36. On “high modernism,” see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 4–6 and passim.

37. Paarlberg, “Attention Whole Foods Shoppers.” See also Manitra A. Rakotoarisoa, Massimo Iafrate, and Marianna Pacchali, Why Has Africa Become a Net Food Importer? Explaining Africa Agricultural and Food Trade Deficits (Rome: Food and Markets Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2011), http://www.fao.org/ docrep/015/i2497e/i2497e00.pdf.

38. For a provocative argument proposing a fusion of organic farming and genetic engineering, see Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchak, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

39. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Environmental Performance of Agriculture in OECD Countries since 1990 (Paris: OECD, 2008), http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/agriculture-and-food/ environmental-performance-of-agriculture-in-oecd-countries-since- 1990_9789264040854-en; OECD, OECD Compendium of Agri-environmental Indicators (Paris: OECD, 2013), http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/agriculture-and-food/ oecd-compendium-of-agri-environmental-indicators_9789264186217-en.

40. Peter A. Coclanis, “Food Is Much Safer Than You Think,” Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2011, A13.

41. On ways to reduce food waste, particularly postharvest loss, see, for example, Peter A. Coclanis, “Low-Hanging Fruit: The Fight for Food Security,” Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), 29 December 2015, http://mondediplo.com/outsidein/ low-hanging-fruit-the-fight-for-food-security; Coclanis, “There Is a Simple Way to Improve the World’s Food Systems,” Aeon, 27 February 2017, https://aeon.co/ideas/ there-is-a-simple-way-to-improve-the-worlds-food-systems.

42. On some of the advantages of GMO crops, see, for example, Marc Van Montagu, “The Irrational Fear of GM Food,” Wall Street Journal, 23 October 2013, A15; Lusk, The Food Police, 101–13; Joel Mokyr, “What Today’s Economic Gloomsayers Are Missing,” Wall Street Journal, 8 August 2014.

43. See, for example, Ronald Bailey, “The End of Farming,” Reason 47 ( June 2015): 22–23; Nicholas Kristof, “The (Fake) Meat Revolution,” New York Times, 19 September 2015. It is both ironic—and telling—that Tyson Foods (of all food companies) has recently taken ownership of 5% of Silicon Valley synthetic meat producer Beyond Meat, one of the leaders in this rising field. See Stephanie Strom, “Tyson Foods, a Meat Leader, Invests in Protein Alternatives,” New York Times, 10 October 2016.

44. On the Haber-Bosch process (for synthetically fixing nitrogen in plants through the production/processing of ammonia), see, for example, Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). Smil, a noted historian of technology, considers the Haber-Bosch process the most important technological innovation of the twentieth century. Again, on the potential union of GMOs and organic agriculture, see Ronald and Adamchak, Tomorrow’s Table.

45. On Food Week at Duke in October 2010, see https://foodatduke.wordpress.com/, accessed 19 January 2015. On the “Shared Tables” symposium, 28–29 February 2012, see https://sharedtablessymp.wordpress.com/, accessed 19 January 2015.

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http://www.fao.org/docrep/015/i2497e/i2497e00.pdf

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http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/agriculture-and-food/oecd-compendium-of-agri-environmental-indicators_9789264186217-en

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https://foodatduke.wordpress.com/,accessed

https://sharedtablessymp.wordpress.com/

The Americanness of Industrial Agriculture 59

46. For more on my perspective regarding agriculture, see Peter A. Coclanis, “Food Chains: The Burdens of the (Re)Past,” Agricultural History 72 (Fall 1998): 661–74; Coclanis, “Breaking New Ground: From the History of Agriculture to the History of Food Systems,” Historical Methods 38 (Winter 2005): 5–13; Coclanis, “Two Cheers for Revolution: The Virtues of Regime Change in World Agriculture,” Historically Speaking 10 ( June 2009): 2–7.

47. Jayson Lusk, Food Demand Survey, 15 January 2015, http://jaysonlusk.com/ blog/2015/1/15/food-demand-survey-foods-january-2015; Brandon R . McFadden and Jayson L. Lusk, “What Consumers Don’t Know about Genetically Modified Food and How That Affects Beliefs,” FASEB Journal: The Official Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (30 September 2016): 3091–96, http://www.fasebj.org/ content/30/9/3091. Note that in the McFadden and Lusk survey, 32% of those surveyed did not think that vegetables contained DNA!

48. Tara Parker-Pope, “Hard Road for Those Who Seek Veganism,” New York Times, 17 April 2012, D1; Frank Newport, “In U.S., 5% Consider Themselves Vegetarians,” Gallup, Well-Being, 26 July 2012, http://www.gallup.com/poll/156215/consider-themselves- vegetarians.aspx.

49. Steve Bertoni, “Sweet Investment: How Dean Metropoulos Made Billions Saving the Hostess Twinkie,” Forbes, 28 February 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ stevenbertoni/2017/02/28/sweet-investment-how-dean-metropoulos-made-billions- saving-the-hostess-twinkie/#62c36fbc1f50. For another valuable assessment, particularly regarding the declining position of workers at Hostess Brands, see Rick Wartzman, “What Hostess Brands’ Return to the Stock Market Says about the State of U.S. Workers,” Fortune, 25 July 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/07/25/hostess-twinkie-ipo/.

50. Rebecca Leung, “The Subway Diet,” CBS News, 48 Hours, 2 March 2004, http:// www.cbsnews.com/news/the-subway-diet-02-03-2004/; “Twinkie Diet Helps Nutrition Professor Lose 27 Pounds,” CNN.com, 8 November 2010, http://www.cnn.com/ 2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/; Samantha Grossman, “Teacher Loses 37 Pounds after Three-Month McDonald’s Diet,” NewsFeed, TIME.com, 5 January 2014, http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/05/teacher-loses-37-pounds- after-three-month-mcdonalds-diet/; Bruce Feldman, “UNC’s Carter Heads ‘Freaks’ List,” Bruce Feldman Blog, ESPN Insider, 24 June 2010, http://insider. espn.go.com/ncf/blog/_/name/feldman_bruce/id/5322140/north-carolina-lb- bruce-carter-biggest-athletic-freak-game; Laurie Stampler, “Usain Bolt Ate 100 Chicken McNuggets a Day in Beijing and Somehow Won Three Gold Medals,” NewsFeed, TIME.com, 4 November 2013, http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/11/04/ olympic-gold-medalist-reveals-beijing-diet-of-1000-chicken-mcnuggets-in-10-days/.

51. See Peter A. Coclanis and Fitz Brundage, “Fast-Food Region: Cheap, ‘Energy-Dense’ Eats in a Poor, Unhealthy Part of the United States” (paper presented at conference “State of the Plate: Food and the Local/Global Nexus,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 27 March 2015).

52. See Renee Johnson and Jim Monke, What Is the Farm Bill?, Congressional Record Service, CRS Report 7-5700, 8 February 2017, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22131.pdf. See also Peter A. Coclanis, “One Man’s Pork Is Another Man’s Bacon,” Durham Herald- Sun, 20 September 2015, C4. Federal involvement in agriculture goes back a long way in the United States, as Sarah Ludington details in her essay in this volume.

pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2015/1/15/food-demand-survey-foods-january-2015

http://www.fasebj.org/content/30/9/3091

http://www.gallup.com/poll/156215/consider-themselves-vegetarians.aspx

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2017/02/28/sweet-investment-how-dean-metropoulos-made-billions-saving-the-hostess-twinkie/#62c36fbc1f50

http://fortune.com/2016/07/25/hostess-twinkie-ipo/

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-subway-diet-02-03-2004/

http://CNN.com

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/

http://TIME.com

http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/05/teacher-loses-37-pounds-after-three-month-mcdonalds-diet/

http://insider.espn.go.com/ncf/blog/_/name/feldman_bruce/id/5322140/north-carolina-lb-bruce-carter-biggest-athletic-freak-game

http://TIME.com

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/11/04/olympic-gold-medalist-reveals-beijing-diet-of-1000-chicken-mcnuggets-in-10-days/

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22131.pdf

60 Peter A. Coclanis

53. Gina Kolata, “Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity,” New York Times, 18 April 2012; John McWhorter, “The Food Desert Myth,” New York Daily News, 22 April 2012; Joe Cortright, “Where Are the Food Deserts?,” City Observatory, 5 January 2015, http://cityobservatory.org/food-deserts/. Note that a 2009 systematic review of the literature on food deserts concluded that they do exist in parts of the country but that their patterning and effects are complex. See Julie Beaulac, Elizabeth Kristjansson, and Steven Cummins, “A Systematic Review of Food Deserts, 1966–2007,” Preventing Chronic Disease 6 ( July 2009): http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2009/jul/08_0163.htm; Penny Gordon-Larsen, “Food Availability/Convenience and Obesity,” Advances in Nutrition 5 (November 2014): 809–17. For an excellent—realist—primer on today’s food world, see Robert Paarlberg, Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

pe rm it te d un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

http://cityobservatory.org/food-deserts/

http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2009/jul/08_0163.htm