Siesta time, amigos

PETER: Hey, guys. Let’s hit the phones and take a call from one of our listeners. We’ve got Michael on the line from Forest, Virginia.

Michael, welcome to BackStory.

MICHAEL: Pleasure to be here.

PETER: Michael, what’s on your mind?

MICHAEL: So it seems like at the current moment that there’s kind of a shift going on with the public’s attitude towards agricultural work with things like the local food movement and the organic movement that it’s becoming something more desirable for some people. So on the one hand, it is kind of a desired job and something that’s seen as connecting you with nature.

ED: Right.

PETER: Right.

MICHAEL: But at the same time, it’s seen as something really difficult. And I know from my parents’ generation, it was something to be avoided. So I’m wondering over the course of US history how this kind of attitude has changed about how desirable or undesirable agricultural work has been?

PETER: Yeah. Michel, that’s a great question. I’ll kick off our collective answer by speaking briefly about the early period. And in the thought of Thomas Jefferson, the experience of early America, which was, of course, predominantly agricultural, agricultural work was the work of the land. It was the work that made America prosperous, so there was a certain, you might even say glamor to it, but it was a kind of a civic glamor, because early thinkers like Jefferson thought that farmers who produced for larger markets and for us all, as you like to say, were also independent.

They had a place to stand. They owned their own property. They could subsist. And I think what’s changed over time, and I’d like to hear my colleagues talk about this, is that the new locavore movement is dissenting from the way things are for the mass of Americans and establishing a new kind of independence outside of conventional industrial markets.

[LAUGHTER]

ED: That’s quite the gauntlet you’re throwing down there, Peter.

[LAUGHTER]

The 19th century was, I think, the century of the rise and fall of the farmer in some ways. You know, as Peter says from Thomas Jefferson’s era the romanticization of the farmer, the incredible spread of the United States was basically the spread of farmers and sort of putting land into what they saw as productive use. But by the eras after the Civil War, the decades after the Civil War, their great political crisis was the farmers versus everybody else.

They felt that the currency system was stacked against them. They felt that their cultural stock was in rapid decline. This was when words like “hayseeds” and “hick” were first invented and deployed.

And so I think that the patterns you’re talking about now a comingled reverence for the farm, but an abandonment of the farm, have been going on now for well over a century.

BRIAN: And you can see that, Michael, absolutely embedded in government policy in the 20th century. The reverence lingers through the notion of the single-family farm. And so the government’s basically subsidizing people through cheap land to now go way out to the west where the land is much more arid, and where it’s utterly impossible for the individual to farm a, you know, 40-acre plot without lots of irrigation and stuff. So that reverence is there, this notion of the independent farmer. But the wherewithal to actually accomplish that is not there.

ED: I’d kind of like to know where Michael’s coming from on this. So, Michael, are you involved in this big change? Are you involved in agricultural labor?

MICHAEL: Yeah, I am. My fiance and I are in our second year right now running a small farm and bakery.

ED: What do you farm? Michael, what do you grow?

MICHAEL: We grow a lot of salad greens, just mixed vegetables. About 30 different varieties.

ED: Wow.

MICHAEL: We also raise ducks for eggs. I know a lot of my friends who work on farms who grow vegetables this kind of year is kind of the time where you question the sort of romanticism that you have about it when you’ve been working out in the heat for long days and everything.

ED: So do you see the work that you’re doing as a kind of self-conscious return to the past? Or is this sort of a new departure?

MICHAEL: I don’t really see it as a return to the past because at least for us we’ve really embraced many parts of technology. We’re using computers to learn things to a large degree, and to make our work more efficient.

BRIAN: Yeah, one of the things that strikes me about farming really all the way back to Peter’s period in the 18th century is that farmers jump on any technological change or possibility. They’re often the ones who bring these things to the market, whether it’s, you know, the reaper or using tractors or the whole digital revolution that you refer to in terms of using computers.

MICHAEL: Right.

ED: So it seems to me a constant for all of this– this is a show about the work ethic– is that you farmers find ways to work as hard as you possibly can in one way or another. I mean–

BRIAN: Yeah, in spite of all that technology. You know, it’s true the folks at where I live drive an air-conditioned cabs, but they’re driving those tractors as soon as the sun comes up. And in fact, they’re often driving then at night, which I was really surprised. So regardless of the technological improvements that you refer to, Michael, my sense of farmers is I would never do that. That’s too much work.

MICHAEL: Exactly. One advantage that we have now is I can listen to shows like your all’s while I’m working and take my mind off it a little bit.

[LAUGHTER]

ED: That’s terrific.

PETER: Now that’s the good life.

ED: That’s great. Thanks a lot, Michael.

MICHAEL: All right, thank you.

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ED: If you have a question about our upcoming shows, let us know. We’re working on episodes about the history of manufacturing, debating in America, and a Halloween special– The History of Horror. You’ll find it all a backstoryradio.org. Or just shoot us an email at backstory@virginia.edu.