Paths of Fire by Adams Robert M.; Adams Robert M. M.;

Author:Adams, Robert M.; Adams, Robert M. M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Agricultural Expansion and Commercialization

As had also been true in England, there was a close association on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean between massive changes in industry and agriculture. The pace of technological change in U.S. agriculture underwent a marked acceleration around the middle of the nineteenth century, and successive transformations continued for at least some decades into the twentieth. Those dates suggest at least a partial reversal of the arrow of causality in the American case, with the production of large agricultural surpluses less a precondition and more a consequence of industrial growth.

Playing a much more salient part in the United States than in Britain were newly founded industrial organizations that aggresssively promoted technological enhancements of American farming practices. By the 1850s they were achieving striking successes in the production and sale of newly invented agricultural machinery. Encountering rapidly rising demand, they were no less successful in extending and improving their product lines to meet newly articulated needs. Capital investment in such machinery on the part of individual farmers unquestionably was responsible for a major share of the ensuing advances in agricultural productivity.

However, much more was involved in this development than a tour de force in marketing and corporate management. The turning from subsistence to commercial agriculture rested more fundamentally on twin foundations. One was the growing ability of railroad networks economically to interconnect lightly settled western regions of concentrated agricultural production with eastern urban centers. The other was the demonstrated readiness of a large part of the farming population to abandon the autarchic, subsistence-oriented conditions of life along the earlier frontier as soon as this became feasible. Far from being hapless victims of urban or industrial initiatives, American farmers actively took part in becoming specialized producers tied to the interdependencies of mass markets.

There are other, no less substantial differences between the British and American instances. In particular, land was limited and labor relatively more abundant in England, while approximately the opposite relationship later obtained in the United States (at least on newly settled lands inland from the former colonies). Associated with this contrast was another, between English farmers who were primarily tenants and Americans who were predominantly freeholders. Tenantry had an apparent braking effect on adoption rates for new technology, but at the same time it helped to generate the great landed incomes that went into English industrialization.

Given the vastly greater geographic sweep and degree of climatic zonation in the United States, the emergence of regional variation is obviously a theme of fundamental importance in any comprehensive account. However, for our purposes it is of secondary interest. The major themes of distinctively American development are better portrayed by focusing on the northern midwestern heartland, extending from central Nebraska eastward through Ohio and from the Dakotas southward through Kansas. Well into the twentieth century, it was here that the cutting edge of agricultural advance was consistently to be found especially with regard to the cultivation of the two principal midwestern crops, wheat and maize (corn).

Steeply rising population and

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