American Agriculture

We already have a Soviet Agriculture thread; why not an American? Now, this might seem like a stupid copycat thread, but I actually do have some genuine questions:

WI farm consolidation hadn't happened? Or rather, why did farm consolidation happen, and was there any way to counterbalance it?

Somewhat related, here is a set of posters and such from the USDA in the 1914-1945 era (along with some other school-lunch related stuff from the 1950s and '60s, but I'm not worried about those). What I find particularly interesting there is the promotion of small-scale gardening. What would it take to have the USDA or some other government branch (eg., HEW/HHS) to promote such behavior in more recent times, like the 1960s-1980s?

WI certain Nixon-era policies hadn't been adopted wrt food production? From what I recall reading Micheal Pollan, around 1970 or so, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture changed the policy of the USDA about food production. Previously (IIRC) the policy had been to try to maintain a reasonable price for the farmer while producing enough food to feed the country (and a lot of the world, too!). Afterwards, it was to maximize production. How could that have been avoided?

What about "sustainability"? Especially in the earlier part of the century, there seemed to be a focus on producing lots and lots of food without closely analyzing how that food was being produced--eg., draining fossil groundwater (I'm looking at you, Ogalla). WI some event--say, the Dust Bowl, or preferably something earlier--had led to a shift in thinking towards a more balanced take on food production? How would something like that get done?

WI US agriculture was less advanced? It seems that a lot of important technological advancements in agriculture were developed or at least popularized here. Things like combines, tractors, reaper machines, hybrid seeds, and so on. What would it take to significantly retard the development and use of such techs in the US?

Anyone else have anything they want to know?
 
It would be interesting to see agriculture advance along a different tack that it has, not retarded as such but along a different path.
 
It might be interesting if Henry Agard Wallace never got picked to be Veep. Wallace was a very capable administrator, a brilliant man, and a great speaker, but first and foremost, he was an agricultural expert. He was one of the earliest breeders of hybrid corn, wrote one of the first agricultural economics textbooks, and edited a major farm magazine before he was picked as Agriculture Secretary.
 
Something which would be cool would be smaller farms and mixed agricultural regions instead of giant farms in single type regions serving the global market for shit-tasting bulk food. I don't know how this would happen, perhaps if people decided en masse that it is better to have no tomatoes out of season than have tomatoes bred to survive travel and storage from all-year-round growing regions that taste like shit and have a texture that feels like they have been frozen and thawed a couple of times.

If such a paradigm occured I think there would be interesting demographic changes. Country towns could thrive if more people occupied farmland for starters.
 
The reason for crappy tomatoes is, if they weren't so tough, most people would know tomatoes as the vegie that is used to make pastes and sauces. They just don't transport long distances well, even now.

The Toms you get for eating are still picked green for transport to stores. If allowed to ripen fully on the vine first, they still taste wonderful. But those can only transport in small quantities for short distances before they go 'ugly'.
 
I know, that's my point. I was wondering what agriculture would be like if people decided not to eat these terrible tasting tomatoes but instead only eat local tomatoes in season. The growing season can be extended by using hothouses, so people may be able to eat local tomatoes for half the year in colder climates. This would apply to many fresh foods.

If this was the paradigm cities would be surrounded by mixed farms because the only way to get the fresh, flavoursome foods people wanted to eat to them in good condition is to minimise transportation and storage.
 
More complex than that. There is no way to get fresh fruits and vegetables to the masses in large metropolitan areas if it isn't picked 'green'. From vine ripe to overripe takes about 3 to 4 days.

In the best case, One day to pick, one day to transport, one day to sell, one day to eat. And all of that eating has to be done in a few weeks time. Now how are you going to feed over 5 million people (not to mention the 20 million plus in the New York Metropolitan area) this way? Outside of basic staples which can be stored (tubers, squash, legumes and grains), This attitude would mean most fruits and veggies would be eaten canned or not at all. You think they taste bad with today's methods, this would be even worse.
 
Firstly let me clarify, I'm only talking about stuff where freshness is important. Grain, livestock and the like can be farmed anywhere.

Secondly I think you might be being a bit pessimistic about your timeline from plant to mouth. I'm talking about fresh food farms ringing cities in a a market where freshness and therefore speed is important and methods are in place to ensure that time isn't wasted, so the truck arrives in the afternoon to take the days pick to town within a couple of hours and its on sale the next day. And besides I often have to leave food out for a couple of days for it to ripen enough to eat, so the unripe picking model is hardly perfect or even particularly good.
 
Keep Earl Butz down on his family's 160-acre farm instead of making him dean of Purdue University and Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon and Ford. It was Butz who declared that farmers had to "get big or get out" and advocated planting fence row to fence row, which created a huge boom-bust cycle in ag commodities and drove a lot of family farms out of business. He was a big promoter of monocrop agriculture. He retailored federal ag policies to favor corporate farming and away from the small-farm focus that had been part of the New Deal reforms. Butz (and Nixon) saw ag production as a weapon to use against the Soviets in the Cold War, since it allowed the US to manipulate world grain prices at a time when the USSR needed to buy huge amounts of grain from the US and other producers due to bad harvests in the Ukraine.

Once corporate lobbying money (bankrolled largely by federal farm subsidies) entered the federal agriculture arena and corporate grants began controlling academic ag research, the small farm's days were numbered.
 
Keep Earl Butz down on his family's 160-acre farm instead of making him dean of Purdue University and Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon and Ford. It was Butz who declared that farmers had to "get big or get out" and advocated planting fence row to fence row, which created a huge boom-bust cycle in ag commodities and drove a lot of family farms out of business. He was a big promoter of monocrop agriculture. He retailored federal ag policies to favor corporate farming and away from the small-farm focus that had been part of the New Deal reforms. Butz (and Nixon) saw ag production as a weapon to use against the Soviets in the Cold War, since it allowed the US to manipulate world grain prices at a time when the USSR needed to buy huge amounts of grain from the US and other producers due to bad harvests in the Ukraine.

Once corporate lobbying money (bankrolled largely by federal farm subsidies) entered the federal agriculture arena and corporate grants began controlling academic ag research, the small farm's days were numbered.

So essentially, that one POD could cover my first and third (and possibly fourth) WI questions?
 

NothingNow

Banned
So essentially, that one POD could cover my first and third (and possibly fourth) WI questions?
Yeah. That's right.
Also: Maybe small farmers create more produce sales co-ops as part of the Butterflies from the POD. They can compete with the big firms on volume and lobby Washington while still being able to act as individual small farmers.
 
I'm sorry, but you still have the problem that for most of the year 'fresh' is now unavailable. Today it comes from all parts of the country, and even out country. For that you need mass production and hardy travel species. That or American cuisine stays as boring as British. :p
 
The sort of fruit and veggies that travel tough breeding provides makes cuisine boring and foul tasting. Also it is only the barest selection of produce that is available year-round, seasons still matter with fruit and veggies. For us mangos and avacados are gone but stonefruit are becoming abundant. Sure you can still get a mango if you need one, but the off season prices ensure that I never need one out of season. In fact I won't eat a lot of the shit on offer when its out of season, it looks rancid and usually tastes like cardboard.

Just as a matter of interest I'm musing on a very different paradigm than we see today, the issues you raise are valid in the current model but don't have to be set in stone. Other models and methods of making them happen could have been developed instead, and we'd consider them normal if they occured.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
It might be interesting if Henry Agard Wallace never got picked to be Veep. Wallace was a very capable administrator, a brilliant man, and a great speaker, but first and foremost, he was an agricultural expert. He was one of the earliest breeders of hybrid corn, wrote one of the first agricultural economics textbooks, and edited a major farm magazine before he was picked as Agriculture Secretary.

He also founded Pioneer Seed, which more or less invented the mass marketing of hybrid corn. Hybridizing the corn put us in a position to more than double our yield between the beginning and end of the Depression. If there was no hugely available hybrid seed corn, the whole world wouldn't be eating as well as it does.

Feed corn feeds hogs, cows, anything else that needs silage and stuff. And sweet corn feeds people. If we didn't have the amount that we do, we could produce food on the scale we do today.
 
I know, that's my point. I was wondering what agriculture would be like if people decided not to eat these terrible tasting tomatoes but instead only eat local tomatoes in season. The growing season can be extended by using hothouses, so people may be able to eat local tomatoes for half the year in colder climates. This would apply to many fresh foods.

If this was the paradigm cities would be surrounded by mixed farms because the only way to get the fresh, flavoursome foods people wanted to eat to them in good condition is to minimise transportation and storage.

Then we butterfly away suburbia. I think we need an earlier POD. by the 50s farmland was being bought to clear the way for Suburbs. Levittown famously sold its first house in 54-55 (IIRC). To Achieve this we need an earlier POD than the 70s, IMO.
 
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