In the Blood : Understanding America's Farm Families by Wuthnow Robert

Author:Wuthnow, Robert [Wuthnow, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-10-10T07:00:00+00:00

5

THE LAND

When you work the land for so many years, you identify with it. It is something we take care of. We’re stewards of it.

—Corn-belt farmer, male, age 66

I’m taking care of it for the next generation, whoever that may be. The day is coming when I’ll be in a nursing home. I want them to say, “you know, old man, you did it right.”

—Wheat-belt farmer, male, age 57

“Here’s my field,” Bill Sellers says, pointing across the open expanse as he pulls the pickup to the edge of the road. “I just want to take a quick peek, see how ripe it is.” He walks a few paces into the field. The wheat is knee high but still green. “This is one of my best pieces of ground,” he says. He grabs one of the stalks, opens the head and squeezes one of the kernels between his thumbnail and forefinger. “You want it to be hard dough,” he says. “That head has just a little bit of juice in it, which may be alright. Once it gets into hard dough, then you can spray it.”

Mr. Sellers has been inspecting the wheat in this field for nearly half a century. He grew up just down the road. As a boy he watched his father cultivating the field and harvesting the wheat. In those days you watched and waited. When the stalks turned color and the kernels hardened, you harvested.

Things have changed. Mr. Sellers spends far less time in the field than he used to. But he has to know a lot more to get the best crop. The wheat is modified so weeds can be sprayed at a particular moment without damaging the wheat. “If you spray it too soon,” he explains, “it will shrivel up the kernel and hurt the quality of the wheat.” He decides to wait a few more days before spraying.

“Look at this,” he says, examining another stalk. “You can see some streaking there. That’s a little bit of disease.” He points to a black spot near the top of the head. “That’s a scab disease. This year we put fungicide on. That helps prevent it.” Without the fungicide, more of the heads would have been empty. He figures the field will still make forty bushels an acre. In the old days, fifteen would have been good. Now forty is below average.

What does the land mean to a farmer like Mr. Sellers? Does it still hold the kind of attraction that drew the first settlers—the ones who broke the sod and staked out a place for their families? Does it mean what it did for Mr. Sellers’s father after spending long days each summer plowing the field? Or has it become a place in which the technical expertise involved in spraying weeds and applying fungicide is the main preoccupation?

Land, labor, and capital. In economic theory these were the classic factors of production. Their utility was to produce goods. The story of economic modernization was a shift from the first to the third.

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