The Past and Present Farming Frontier

Question for Discussion: How does farming
in the Plains between 1880 and 1940 help us
understand the dilemmas faced by farmers
in the modern West?

Reading: Limerick, Legacy of Conquest , pp. 124-133;
Athearn, "The Dreaming is Finished"

Video: From The Plow that Broke the Plains

Settling and Farming in the
Great Plains

Lousianna Purchase 1803: Map (in-class)
Long's Map of the Great American Desert (in-class)
Long Describes the Great American Desert
(in-class)
The Great American Desert becomes
the Great Plains
The Myth of the Garden and Settling
the Great Plains (in-class)
"The Great West" Advertisement
Batchelder Promotes farming in the
Dakota Territory (in-class)
Annual Rainfall in the West (in-class)
1862 Homestead Act
The basic idea of Rain follows the Plow (in-class)
Rain follows the Plow (in-class)
Limerick, Farming in the Great Plains (in-class)
Nebraska as Desert and as Garden
Solomon Butcher: Photographs of
Nebraska Homesteaders (in-class)

The Bureau of Reclamation
The Bureau of Reclamation History (in-class)
Bureau of Reclamation Fact Sheet:
Western Farmers Served (in-class)
Bureau of Reclamation Homepage
Water Operations within the Bureau
of Reclamations (see Great Plains) (in-class)

The Dust Bowl on the Plains
Athearn, The Dreaming is Finished (in-class)
Dust Bowl Timeline (in-class)
Map of the Dust Bowl (in-class)
The Script for the Plow that Broke
the Plains
Images from the Dust Bowl (in-class)
Dust Storms and their Damage (in-class)
Report of the Great Plains Drought
Committee (1936)
"The Challenge of the Arid West" by
Historian Donald Worster

New Deal and Government Farm Programs in the West
New Deal Farm Programs (in-class)
New Deal Farm Programs and
Agricultural Subsidies
Farming in the 1930s: Parity and Price Supports
(in-class)
U.S. Farms Support: Parity and Profits
Rural Policy and Government support
for Farming
U.S. Government Farm Subsidies
Database (in-class)
Agricultural Welfare 2002
2002 Farm Bill Programs
Farm Bill 2002: Corporate Welfare
or Farmer's Friend (in-class)

Farming the West Today
Ogallala Aquifer over the Great Plains (in-class)
Map of Ogallala Aquifer (in-class)
Water Level Changes in the
Ogallala Aquifer 1980-1999 (in-class)
Map of Water Users in the West (in-class)
Water Consumed by Western States (in-class)
Indian Water Rights in the West
Dams in the West
The Great Plains and Prairie
Water Irrigation in the West (1990) (in-class)
Ground Water Withdrawals in
the West (1990)
Irrigation Ground Water Withdrawals
in the West in 1990 (color map) (in-class)
Ground Water Withdrawals for
Farming in the West (1990)
U.S. Drought Monitor 2006 (in-class)
Berry, Farming and Soil Eroision in the 1970s
(in-class)
Farming Crisis 1998

Settling and Farming in the Great Plains (in-class)
The Bureau of Reclamation (in-class)
The Dust Bowl on the Plains (in-class)
New Deal and Government Farm
Programs in the West (in-class)
Farming in the 1930s: Parity and Price Supports
(in-class)
U.S. Farms Support: Parity and Profits
Government Farms Subsidies 1995 to
2005 in billions of dollars (in-class)
U.S. Government Farm Subsidies
Database (in-class)
Farming the Great Plains today (in-class)

The Great American Desert

During the early Nineteenth Century, the Great Plains region of the United States--which includes Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Eastern Colorado, Nebraska, and Oklahoma--was identified on maps as "the Great American Desert." The explorers Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long originated this idea with their descriptions of the region following their expeditions through it. Because this region had very few trees, it was thought to be a desert with little productive value. Settlers were drawn to the Great American Desert by broadsides from railroad companies and the United States government advertising "Millions of Acres" of free and fertile land. By 1890 however, American farmers had settled this region and the "Great American Desert" myth was dispelled.

Explorer Stepen Long wrote:

"[The Great Plains region] is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence. Although tracts of fertile land considerably extensive are occasionally met with, yet the scarcity of wood and water, almost uniformly prevalent, will prove an insuperable obstacle in the way of settling the country. This region, however, may prove of infinite importance to the United States, inasmuch as it is calculated to serve as a barrier to prevent too great an extension of our population westward, and secure us against the machinations or incursions of an enemy." (1820)

Rain Follows the Plow

Later, beginning in the 1870s, promotional brochures and publications lauded the abundant rainfall and fertility of the land. Professor Samuel Aughey, from the University of Nebraska, declared the state's rainfall was adequate to grow robust crops and, in fact, was increasing. "Rainfall follows the plow," he declared in an 1880 book, Sketches of the Physical Geography and Geology of Nebraska. The problem, he said, was that rain would hit the hard sod and run off and into the rivers. If farmers broke up the sod, the rain would soak in and then return to the air as it evaporated. With more moisture in the air, more rain would fall, continuing the cycle. Professor Aughey and others wrote and spoke far and wide. The railroads used their trains to distribute Aughey's book and others to prospective settlers. And for a few relatively wet years, the theory seemed to be true. Rainfall was increasing. But when the next cycle of dry years hit, many new settlers learned the truth in hard ways -- Nebraska could support agriculture but not using the same techniques they had learned in more humid climates.

The Myth of the Garden and
Settling the Great Plains(Advertisement)

Western boosters popularized the myth of the Garden to encourage settlement during the second half of the nineteenth century. Charles Dana Wilber was one of the leading advocates of this myth. In The Great Valley, and Prairies of the Northeast and Northwest, Wilber described the trans-Mississippi West as a lush paradise. He based this claim on "scientific" evidence that purportedly proved that "rain follows the plow." The myth of the Garden undermined the idea that the West was the "Great American Desert" and convinced many American farmers that they could prosper on the Plains.
The credibility of the Garden myth was strengthened by the unusually high levels of rainfall recorded throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, which further encouraged settlement. But, by the mid 1880s, the Plains entered a period of low rainfall and massive out-migration. Families began to leave with signs on their wagons, "In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted."

George A. Batchelder Promotes Dakota Territory, 1870

Think of it young men, you who are "rubbing" along from year to year, with no great hopes for the future, can you accept for a little while the solitude of nature and bear a few hard knocks for a year or two? Lay aside your paper collars and kid gloves. Work a little. Possess your soul with patience and hold on your way with a firm purpose. Do this, and there is a beautiful home for you out here. Prosperity, freedom, independence, manhood in its highest sense, peace of mind and all the comforts and luxuries of life are awaiting you. The fountain of perennial youth is in the country, never in the city. Its healing, beautifying and restoring waters do not run through aqueducts. You must lie down on the mossy bank beneath trees, and drink from gurgling brooks and crystal streams... .

Formerly the individual was the pioneer of civilization; now, the railroad is the pioneer, and the individual follows, or is only slightly in advance. Before the flowers bloom another year, Dakota will have her railroads; they will bring more towns, villages, churches, school houses, newspapers, and thousands of new and free people. The wild roses are blooming today, and the sod is yet unturned, and the prairie chicken rears her brood in quiet and safety, where, in a year or two will be heard the screech of the locomotive and the tramp of the approaching legions, another year will bring the beginning of the change; towns and cities will spring into existence, and the steam whistle and the noise of saws and hammers, and the click and clatter of machinery, the sound of industry will be heard. The prairies will be golden with the ripening harvest, and the field and the forest, the mine and the river, will all yield their abundance to the ever growing multitude.

1902 Reclamation Act

1902 Reclamation Act created the Bureau of Reclamation. The Burea of Reclamation in the Department of Interior: The Bureau of Reclamation's mission is to manage, develop, and protect water and related resources in an environmentally and economically sound manner in the interest of the American public.

New Deal Farm Programs
The New Deal years were characterized by a belief that greater regulation would solve many of the country's problems. In 1933, for example, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) to provide economic relief to farmers. The AAA had at its core a plan to raise crop prices by paying farmers a subsidy to compensate for voluntary cutbacks in production. Funds for the payments would be generated by a tax levied on industries that processed crops. By the time the act had become law, however, the growing season was well underway, and the AAA encouraged farmers to plow under their abundant crops. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace called this activity a "shocking commentary on our civilization." Nevertheless, through the AAA and the Commodity Credit Corporation, a program which extended loans for crops kept in storage and off the market, output dropped.

Between 1932 and 1935, farm income increased by more than 50 percent, but only partly because of federal programs. During the same years that farmers were being encouraged to take land out of production -- displacing tenants and sharecroppers -- a severe drought hit the Great Plains states, significantly reducing farm production. Violent wind and dust storms ravaged the southern Great Plains in what became known as the "Dust Bowl," throughout the 1930s, but particularly from 1935 to 1938. Crops were destroyed, cars and machinery were ruined, people and animals were harmed. Approximately 800,000 people, often called "Okies," left Arkansas, Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma during the 1930s and 1940s. Most headed farther west to the land of myth and promise, California. The migrants were not only farmers, but also professionals, retailers and others whose livelihoods were connected to the health of the farm communities. California was not the place of their dreams, at least initially. Most migrants ended up competing for seasonal jobs picking crops at extremely low wages.

The government provided aid in the form of the Soil Conservation Service, established in 1935. Farm practices that had damaged the soil had intensified the severity of the storms, and the Service taught farmers measures to reduce erosion. In addition, almost 30,000 kilometers of trees were planted to break the force of winds.

Although the AAA had been mostly successful, it was abandoned in 1936, when the tax on food processors was ruled unconstitutional. Six weeks later Congress passed a more effective farm-relief act, which authorized the government to make payments to farmers who reduced plantings of soil-depleting crops -- thereby achieving crop reduction through soil conservation practices.

By 1940 nearly 6 million farmers were receiving federal subsidies under this program. The new act likewise provided loans on surplus crops, insurance for wheat, and a system of planned storage to ensure a stable food supply. Soon, prices of agricultural commodities rose, and economic stability for the farmer began to seem possible.

Rural Policy Development Is Not Synonymous with Agriculture Policy

"Rural" is much more than agriculture, and the future success of our nation's family farms are critically linked to the economies of rural communities. Only 6.3% of rural Americans live on farms, and farming accounts for only 7.6% of rural employment. Ninety percent of rural workers have non-farm jobs. In 1999, 90% of all farm operator's household income came from off-farm sources. Only 0.39% of the U.S. population is engaged in farming as a primary occupation, and only 1.78% of the U.S. rural population is engaged in farming as a primary occupation. In agriculturally dependent counties, or rural areas where agriculture is the dominant sector, as in most of the Great Plains, we are literally in "crisis." Production agriculture of specialty crops and value added agricultural products will be more important and effective for supporting rural communities than commodity agriculture.

Limerick, Farming in the Great Plains
"Agrarian expansion onto the Grat Plains went forward amid high hopes and expectations. Railroads wanted settlers, both as purchasers of their land grants and as future freight customers. In the United States and Europe, railroad advertising promised emigrants the finest of opportunities--fertile land, guaranteed access to markets, the amenities of nearby towns, and the security of one's own home and farm." (125)

"In early Plains farming, hardship was extreme. The grasshoppers would have been nightmare enough....Hailstones, drought, prairie fires, and failed adaptation to the semi-arid West brought periodic disaster." (126)

"Throughout the twentieth century, the familiar frustrations have reappeared: low crop prices, large debts and high interest rates, the fear of foreclosure, and problems in regulating production, varying from crop failure to price lowering overproduction." (130)

"American urban dwellers did not outnumber rural residents until 1920, but by 1981, farmers were less than 3 percent of the population. The loss of power implicit in that percentage could not escape anyone." (131)

Athearn, The Dreaming is Finished

"Until about 1920 the notion persisted and was broadcast to the East and Europe that the West was still a golden land. Its yet-hidden bounties would provide rich spiritual and, especially, material things for those who sought them. True, there was a nervousness growing among some who wondered whether the hard-baked individualism and the tough spirit of independence that had been associated with the earlier frontier era were dying out in the new century. "

"But the West also had always stood for the chance to fashion a better life, to step up another rung or two on the economic ladder; and this feeling, at least, continued. In the West, there was still opportunity for all. The latest land boom, that of the war years, lent credence to the notion, for the euphoria of those bustling days still hung over the region."

"In retrospect, this rape of the countryside has generated considerable criticism; but at the time, westerners, in general, who had used the land vigorously, sometimes recklessly since the opening of the country, had no apologies. In their own day, miners, cattlemen, and timber kings had extracted ruthlessly. Now the businessman-farmer, either suitcase or sedentary, saw an opportunity to apply the results of industry and technology to the land, and there seemed to be a chance to succeed where others had not."

"Despite the big " plow-up " and the apparent prosperous activity, farmers in the twenties were quietly packing up and moving out. Between 1918 and 1933 the population of Hill County, Montana, for example, experienced a steady decline, and property valuations fell as much as a million dollars in a single year. Montana and Idaho showed the largest out-migration of any of the western states during these years."

"These young gamblers made their roll of the dice, and they lost, along with a lot of others who were convinced that they could buck the odds against the Great American Desert of old and somehow could win. They had their reasons. Wheat is a frontier crop, one of the best cash crops around when it comes to farming under chancy conditions, and more than one optimist had run the risk and had won."

"These were the early rounds in a major environmental war that was to rock the West with one savage blow after another. By 1936, about two million American farmers, a high percentage of whom lived in the old Louisiana Purchase country, would be drawing public assistance. As historian Walter P. Webb once remarked, the public domain itself had constituted the original relief fund for farmers, but they had lived with the notion that it was a birthright, not a grant to the poor. With the issuance of actual relief checks there came the humiliating realization that, at least for the moment, America had a new dependent class."

"The entire plains country suffered from wind erosion, but it was the region of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, northeast New Mexico , southeast Colorado , and southwest Kansas that earned the name " Dust Bowl."

"Despite outward efforts to pass over their difficulties, the plains farmers who watched the land blow away were as puzzled as they were discouraged. For generations their ancestors had disturbed the environment, even had fought against it as they spent lifetimes hacking down trees so that they could till the soil, and their efforts at turning the high plains " grass side down, " as Charley Russell put it, merely were a part of the process of farming. When nature began to deal out punishment, they took it, hung on grimly, and told themselves that it was one of the implied risks that they had assumed. But by 1935 they had lost a lot of the faith that brought their forefathers west. Margaret Bourke-White, who made much of her early reputation photographing this flying farm land, said that in the spring of that year an atmosphere of utter hopelessness pervaded the plains country. A lot of folks concluded that it was time to pull up stakes and try agricultural prospecting somewhere else."

"Novels were written and films were made that depicted this tattered agrarian army in retreat; grim-faced men, worn women, and hungry-looking children who stared dully at the overburdened stalled family car, its radiator pointed west. These dejected people differed from the earlier pioneers in that their attitudes did not reflect resolute optimism or hope for a better life farther west but, rather, one of desperate flight from disaster into a questionable but necessary tomorrow. So standard has the scene become, particularly because of the poignant photographs, featured by national picture magazines, made popular during the mid thirties, that it was easy to generalize about the problem."

"In addition to aid being given to the plowmen, those who raised livestock in what was once the vast open range country also benefited. By 1932, cattle were selling for only half of what they had brought three years earlier, and ranchers all across the plains and mountain West, who had survived adversity in many forms, now began to go bankrupt. Proud and independent stockgrowers of a state such as Wyoming, faced by plunging prices and dried-up grasslands, reluctantly turned to the federal government for help."

"Some wanted to forget. The farmers often came from a long line of agrarians, of native or foreign origin, people whose family traditions featured independence and self-reliance. They found themselves in an area of marginal rainfall, at a time when industrialized agriculture was stripping them of their presumed economic freedom. What they did not realize was the fact that they were failing as businessmen, as opposed to tillers of the soil. Agriculture had changed. Still, to ask for aid was a further strain upon an ingrained tradition of seeking favor from no man, and when they put out their hands, they did it with great reluctance. It was a confession of failure, both personally and by a system that they believed in."

"Those once-fabled westerners, who had wrested the land from nature for God and country, now were transformed into plundering agrarian industralists, men who tore up
nature's work in a fruitless effort to raise wheat that nobody wanted to buy and who, with their pulverizing machines, were bound to raise nothing but more dust."

"When the magnitude of this evolution finally sank into western mentalities and into the thinking of that area's admirers in other parts of the nation, even the die-hards among Old West fans had to admit that, indeed, the land of their dreams was no more. The American dream had become an illusion as the myth of unlimited possibilities had run aground on the reality of drought, depression, and agricultural desolation."

Wendell Berry, from the Unsettling of American Agriculture

When I was working on this book - from 1974 to 1977 - the long agricultural decline that it deals with was momentarily disguised as a "boom." The big farmers were getting bigger with the help of inflated land prices and borrowed money, and the foreign demand for American farm products was strong, so from the official point of view the situation looked good. The big were supposed to get bigger. Foreigners were supposed to be in need of our products. The official point of view, foreshortened as usual by statistics, superstitious theory, and wishful prediction, was utterly complacent. Then Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz issued the most optimistic, the most widely obeyed, and the Worst advice ever given to farmers: that they should plow "fencerow to fencerow."

That the situation was not good—for farms or farmers or rural communities or nature or the general public—was even then evident to any experienced observer who would turn aside from the pre-conceptions of ''agribusiness" and look at the marks of deterioration that were plainly visible. And now, almost a decade later, it is evident to everyone that, at least for farmers and rural communities, the situation is catastrophic . Farmers are losing their farms, some are killing themselves, some in the madness of despair are killing other people, and rural economy and rural life are gravely stricken. TV agricultural economists chart the "liquidations of assets," the "shakeouts," and the "downturns," apparently amazed that now even the large "progressive" and "efficient" farmers are in trouble.

But this is not just a financial crisis for country people. Critical questions are being asked of our whole society: Are we, or are we not, going to take proper care of our land, our country? And do we, or do we not, believe in a democratic distribution of usable property? At present, these questions are being answered in the negative. Our soil erosion rates are worse now than during the years of the Dust Bowl. In the arid lands of the West, we are overusing and wasting the supplies of water. Toxic pollution from agricultural chemicals is a growing problem. We are closer every day to the final destruction of private ownership not only of small family farms, but of small usable properties of all kinds. Every problem I dealt with in this book, in fact, has grown worse since the book was written.