Undated handbill, Capital District Cooperative |
And that was the big takeaway from Chapter 7 of the report, which covers the years between 1917 and 1973, when Martin Van Buren's estate became a national park. Small farming was by no means as ubiquitous in the northeast as it had once been, but it was surviving fairly healthily until the postwar oil economy clobbered it in the 1940s and 50s. Long-distance trucking, supermarket chains, expensive new "inputs" like petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and machines, and rising land prices as suburbs expanded into former farming areas all combined to make it exponentially more difficult for small farmers to survive. In his book about Land's Sake, the community farm he helped to start in Weston, Mass., Brian Donahue points to this "sensible regional food system" and suggests that we might do well to aim for something very similar if we're serious about re-regionalizing now.[2]
What's the utility of knowing this? I would suggest that it's a crucial reminder of how extremely recent our current system actually is. My parents grew up with much shorter food supply chains; it's only been within their lifetimes, and mine, that the famed 1,500-mile Caesar salad has been conceivable. And the fact that people are increasingly questioning the wisdom of eating this way begins to make it look as though we could soon see the second half of the 20th century as a stark anomaly, a moment when we let relatively cheap oil seduce us into thinking we could have a level of choice and convenience far beyond what anyone actually needs. Marianna Torgovnik has argued that World War II casts such a long shadow over subsequent U.S. war memories that it's difficult for us to see around it, and I'm wondering whether the same is true of the postwar shift into fully petroleum-powered agriculture.[3] If it is, then the surprisingly interwoven histories of agritourism, preserved farms, and real-life farming before the war can be a useful counter-balance for the tendency to think of the robust small family farm as a thing of the much more distant past.
Next: "A lot of ways to keep a farming going."
[1] R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press, 1994) p. 26.
[2] Brian Donahue, Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 66, 74.
[3] Marianna Torgovnik, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
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