Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1987
Abstract
During the past half century, American agriculture has been revolutionized and rural America has been dramatically transformed. The industrial revolution had arrived in American agriculture in the 1840s when machines and animal power began replacing some hand tools wielded by humans. But not until the 1930s, when petroleum-driven machines rapidly displaced both animal and human power, did this revolution intensify sufficiently to have significant impacts on rural life and farm numbers. Since that time, reliance on farm-produced inputs-fertilizer, seed, energy-has given way to dependence on purchased factors of production. The commercial aspects of farming have nearly obliterated the subsistence components. Diversified farmers have been superseded by specialists. l This new phase of the agricultural revolution was accompanied by a host of economic and social changes. Most notably, the percentage of the population directly involved in agriculture dwindled rapidly. In 1935 there were nearly 7 million farms in the United States. By 1974 only 2.3 million remained. Millions of rural Americans abandoned not only farms but also rural communities. Most of the land in abandoned farms was consolidated into surviving units, so the amount of land in farms remained nearly constant. Between 1935 and 1974, average farm size in the United States increased 83 percent, from 155 acres to 440 acres. 2 This article analyzes the factors that determined both the timing and the extent of farm consolidation in northern and central plains states.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly GPQ 7 (Fail 1987): 256-265 . Copyright 1987 Center for Great Plains Studies, University od Nebraska-Lincoln.