Age of Agricultural Ignorance”: Trends and Concerns for Agriculture Knee-Deep Into the Twenty- First Century

Te “Age of Agricultural Ignorance”: Trends and Concerns for Agriculture Knee-Deep into the Twenty- First Century

STERLING EVANS

he phrase in The TiTle is not mine. I am borrowing it here from syndicated Tcolumnist and cowboy poet Baxter Black, who borrowed the title of one of his own columns “Growth of Agricultural Ignorance” from the editor of the Delmarva Farmer (a weekly agricultural publication serving the Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia region).1 In many ways I agree with the term, and believe it is accurate in part to describe American society in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-frst. Tus, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss some trends in American agriculture, and for that matter, agricultural history, and some concerns that I have about them. Not all the trends are bad, of course, and perhaps in some ways, at least, American society is less agriculturally ignorant than Black and others suggest. Te idea of a national agricultural ignorance is based on several key ar- guments. First is the fact that so many children growing up on farms began choosing to leave an agricultural career and lifestyle by the middle and end of the twentieth century, often with the encouragement of their families. Immi- grant farm laborers likewise urged their children to leave the transient lifestyle of manual labor to focus on education and less physically demanding occupations. Tus, each generation, transient or otherwise, was drawn to professions that required less hard physical labor, so that the percentage of the American population engaged in agriculture dropped from 25 percent in 1933 to less than 2 percent by 2015. But perhaps more important is to consider that via modern and industrial agriculture this 2 percent is doing the job of feeding the rest of the nation, that is, three hundred twenty million people a day, and providing over $45 billion worth of agricultural exports a year to many parts

STERLING EVANS served as president of the Agricultural History Society in 2017–2018. Tis article is based on his presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the society in St. Petersburg, Florida, on May 24, 2018. He thanks Anne Efand, Bert Way, and Tim Bowman for their helpful feedback on the presentation for this article, and thanks his father, Cecil Evans, for recommending some of the sources used in the research.

© the Agricultural History Society, 2019 DOI: 10.3098/ah.2019.093.1.004 Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 5 of the world. “It’s an amazing accomplishment,” Black argued, “that is now taken for granted.” In fact, the United States is the third largest agricultural producer in the world, after China and India, and ranks as the world’s largest agricultural exporter.2 Tat, then, is part of this national agricultural ignorance—that many Americans are unaware of these facts. Te second underlying contribution to the Age of Agricultural Ignorance, Black argued, is an “expanding ignorance of science,” with fewer and fewer students engaged in science- and agriculture-based subjects. Te point is that farmers and those growing up on farms learn science naturally, with a hands- on sense of labor and nature.3 Tis is no new point. In his book Field Life, historian Jeremy Vetter cites how famed nineteenth-century naturalist C. Hart Merriam in requesting feld assistants said he would “rather have the farmer’s boy who knows the plants and animals of his own home than the highest graduate in biology of our leading universities,” and how scientifc journals in the early twentieth century often referred to the knowledge derived in the American West from farmers and ranchers.4 Te larger argument here, perhaps, regards the impact of the rise of urbanization as people began to leave rural areas with fewer dedicated to agriculture. For North America, around 1920 marks the time when both the United States and Canada (1921) became statistically more urban than rural at between 50 and 51 percent of the population. Te urbanization climb has been steady ever since, in the United States up to 80.7 percent urban by the 2010 census, and in Canada 81 percent by 2011. Regionally, the West leads the United States as the most urban part of the country, at 89.9 percent (with the Northeast following at 85 percent, the Midwest at 75.9 percent, and the South at 75.8 percent). Western states like California (95.2 percent urban), Nevada (94.2 percent), Utah (90.6 percent), Hawai’i (91.9 percent), Arizo- na (89.8 percent), and Colorado (86.2 percent) show that despite long rural distances between cities, westerners tend to live in the urban areas. In the Northeast, New Jersey—the “Garden State”—has a 94.2 percent urban rate, followed by Massachusetts (92 percent), Rhode Island (90.7 percent), Con- necticut (88 percent), and New York (87.9 percent).5 Te world as a whole, however, has remained rural much longer, not becoming percentage-wise more urban until 2007.6 Baxter Black pointed to this very phenomenon as part of the origin of the Age of Agricultural Ignorance. “Urbanization inexorably isolates people from the land,” he asserted, and draws them away from the natural processes of food production. To illustrate his point, he waxed nostalgic about calving on 6 Agricultural History his ranch in Arizona:

I have calved a lot of heifers in my life … thousands. All of us who have that type of experience know that after the sweat and strain, the slick and sticky, the hope and pull, the grunt and sigh, when the wet little creature plops on the ground, sometimes there is a moment where time stands still. A second, or two, or fve, we stare, our world suspended, waiting for a sign.Ten the new baby snifs, or blinks, or sneezes, or wiggles an ear, and at that moment, it feels as though a burden has been lifted from our shoulders. We did it. We did it again. Just reg- ular common people like us, engaged in that age-old profession of stockman, have participated in a miracle—life being passed from one generation to the next. It is no small thing to be a part of, and every time it happens, it renews us. Te miracle never diminishes… . [And] as fewer and fewer humans participate in this ancient experience it is our loss.7

Tis personal separation from nature and agriculture and the urban-rural divide are perhaps at the heart of why farming seems to be ignored in main- stream American media and politics, despite its importance in feeding the country and providing billions in export dollars. Tus, are the media and politicians in large part to blame for the development of an Age of Agricultural Ignorance? In “State of the Plate,” muckraking Texan journalist and former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Jim Hightower followed such trends and ofered some valuable insights for answering that question:

Remember last year’s [2016] presidential debates? Trump and Clinton talked about the needs of hard-hit working class families, veterans, coal miners, and others. But—helloooooo—where were the farmers? Indeed, where were the mul- titude of producers—farmworkers, ranchers, ranch hands, fshing crews, seafood workers, et al.—who toil on the lands and waters of this country to bring food to our tables? All went unmentioned, even though economic and emotional depression is spreading through their communities, thanks to bankruptcy-level prices paid by corporate middlemen. In the past three years, farm income has declined steadily, plummeting 12% in just the last year alone. But—poof!—these crucial-but-endangered food producers were totally disappeared by the political cognoscenti.8

To Hightower, others, and me this is a disturbing trend in American politics, and it is not so new. Farmers and agriculture in general (minus the political hot potato of immigrant farm laborers, although that debate rages more about immigration in general and not so much about food production) have been absent from presidential debates now for the past few election cycles. Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 7

It took an American professor in Norway, A. Hope Jahren, to sift through debate transcripts to report in a New York Times op-ed piece that “farm policy hasn’t come up even once in a presidential debate for the past 16 years,” despite how the monetary value of agriculture is nearly eight times greater than that of coal mining—an industry that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump robustly pursued in their 2016 presidential campaigns.9 Tink about that period of time: that would include the debates between Bush-Kerry, Obama-Mc- Cain, Obama-Romney, and Trump-Clinton. And added Hightower, “Not a single one of them—and none of the high-profle TV sparklies assigned by the corporate networks to ask about vital national issues—mentioned the people we count on to produce our food.”10 But of course, it was not always that way. Farming and agriculture were mainstays of the American political scene for over a hundred years, with presidential candidates bending over backward to woo farmers, and with the development of farm movements that were highly politicized like the Grange movement in the Midwest, the Non-partisan League in the Northern Plains, the Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma, and socialist and populist farmers’ movements throughout the American South and West. Even in the 1960 televised debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the network moderator, Charles Warren of Mutual News, opened the debate by asking the presidential aspirants, “It’s a fact, I think, that presidential candidates traditionally make promises to farmers. Why this constant courting of the farmers?” Well, as Jahren surmised, “the courtship is clearly over. How did we get from there to here?”11 Jahren, who grew up in the rural Midwest—southern Minnesota—had a good handle on how to answer her own question. “Today, there are basically two types of farms in America: giant corporate farms that tend to express their political preferences through lobbying, and smaller-yielding, largely family-run farms, many of whom are operated by owners who take on a second job.” On the political level, then, “Te farmer vote that was courted for more than a century was a ballot cast by an American who farmed, and by farming supported a household. Tat farmer is no more.”12 I will return to the topic of corporate versus family farms below, but Jahren’s and Hightower’s analysis here begins to explain the rise of the Age of Agricultural Ignorance in the realm of politics. Te malady has also adversely afected academia, especially in the human- ities where agriculture as an important topic for history, geography, political science, and other disciplines has been bypassed for more trendy concerns. For 8 Agricultural History instance, I was once laughed out of my department chair’s ofce after requesting to ofer a course on agricultural history: “Oh no, who would want to take that?” Sara Gregg, a historian at the University of Kansas, has also written of this dilemma within the academy: “Te central place of agriculture in Amer- ican development is indisputable. … [But] many historians have ignored the natural and economic impacts of agriculture in their analysis of the modern nation.”13 It is telling that she was especially addressing this concern to fellow environmental historians. Certainly, that subdiscipline began with many historians seeing important connections between agriculture and environment, but the trend since then has been to go in many other directions—none of which is necessarily bad, but as Gregg points out, farming is too often ignored in larger studies about modernity.14 As on the American political scene, this ignorance or avoidance of agriculture in academia is nothing new. To attempt flling that void, historian John Schlebecker authored an important book on American agricultural history in the 1970s entitled Whereby We Trive drawing for his title on the words of renowned nineteenth-century Provençal naturalist, entomologist, and philosopher Jean Henri Fabre who once argued, “History celebrates the battlefelds whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed felds whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the king’s bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. Tis is the way of human folly.”15 Other scholars, philosophers, and social critics from past centuries in Europe and the United States understood the importance of agriculture and agricultural labor for state building and for the long-range survival of powerful nations. John Locke in seventeenth-century England argued for the right to property to inspire production and advocated the principle of “natural law”—a theory of land ownership in which property would come about by the exertion of labor on natural resources that became the genesis of the homestead principle. Such thoughts infuenced Tomas Jeferson, of course, with his emphasis on how an “empire of liberty” would be possible via the development of an “agrarian republic.” His role in the creation of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which created the grid-pattern township system to survey and parcel the land of the American frontier, laid the foundation for Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act that embodied the Lockean principle of property and the Jefersonian ideal of agrarianism. Near the same time in Europe, Karl Marx argued that the “bounty of the land”—no matter how fertile or vast, could only be unlocked by labor. His ideology of the modes of production certainly rested on the strong tenet of how nations had to harness labor to the land.16 Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 9

And fnally, in Russia, Leo Tolstoy complained that, “City folks, for the most part, consider feld work to be below them. Nevertheless, the great majority of the people in the world are farmers and it is they who assure the existence of the rest of the people.” He suggested that in his day, “Te human species is almost entirely composed of farmers” and that “therefore being the most moral, healthful, happy, and necessary of occupations, farming is also the most noble of professions and the only one in reality that provides us with the independence of those who forget this.” Tose thoughts are standard to anthropologists’ understanding of what connotes “civilization,” especially how agricultural production and the development of surplus goods provided the time for others in societies across the world to develop the sciences, religions, arts, philosophy, and sports. For Tolstoy, it was more of a matter of wanting and needing to understand farming and agricultural labor, often postponing his writing to work in the felds and keeping a scythe near his desk. He strove to relate to the Russian peasantry, even putting on hold for a year the writing of Anna Karenina (1877) while he worked on famine relief in the countryside. Such feld work caused him to ponder the meaning of life, how to live simply, and how we should all show empathy with those around us and on whom we depend for sustenance.17 It is heartening to me that we in the feld of agricultural history also have yearned to understand these basic connections between farming and society in general. In this new year (2019) we will be celebrating the centennial anniversary of the Agricultural History Society, commemorating that the organization is one of the longest-lasting associations within the discipline of history—a tribute indeed to the importance of agriculture in society and hon- oring our work to dispel the Age of Agricultural Ignorance. And a rundown of the history of the discipline shows that we have not been averse to changes in focus to help us interpret the intersections of agriculture and society. We can recall that in the organization’s frst few decades the majority of works in our feld centered on agricultural economics and farming technology. By the middle of the twentieth century we began to look more at agricultural labor and rural life—a topic that opened all kinds of doors into the social history of farming and food. Toward the end of the century, refecting the greater discipline of history in general, we appropriately started to delve more into the roles of race, class, and gender in agricultural history. And fnally, by the turn of the twenty-frst century we were seeking to show connections with urban history, environmental history, and transnational history.18 Te theme of the 2018 Agricultural History Society conference, “Tropicana: Commodities 10 Agricultural History across Borders,” represented this new-found interest in transnational agriculture extremely well, and there was a great variety of panels and papers presented on the topic from many parts of the world. It is this transnational turn that I personally fnd very compelling and important, especially as the discipline of agricultural history continues to reach out to more scholars in a variety of disciplines and continues to address international agricultural concerns and connections. As I have written elsewhere, “Te history of rural America has been one forever connected to places far from rural America. From dependence on foreign markets for importing labor and inputs, to dependence on foreign markets to which to export American agricultural products, the international context of agriculture has important and formative efects on the experience of rurality in the United States.”19 Tese transnational connections began with the development of plantation agriculture in the American South where, like in Brazil and the Caribbean, the production of sugar, and later tobacco and cotton, demanded a labor force that could not be flled by European settlers in the New World, and where indigenous peoples successfully revolted against slavery or were too few in numbers for an adequate labor regime. Te African slave trade that ensued, along with the international markets for American-grown commodities, illustrate well how the American colonies’ economic history from the start was dependent on transnational connections. Tis of course is nothing new in American historiography, especially as the subfeld of Atlantic World history evolved in the late twentieth century. But beyond histories of the slave trade, important studies that looked more carefully at the commodities themselves and at the agricultural, social, and cultural connections of slavery started to emerge.20 Consider, for example, Sydney Mintz’s seminal 1985 book Sweetness and Power, which traced the transformation of sugar as a luxury commodity for wealthy Europeans to an everyday staple and an essential working-class fuel-food ingredient for the Industrial Revolution. Mintz explored how commodity histories have larger stories to tell with far-reaching international dimensions.21 Sugar itself is perhaps the quintessential exemplar of transnational agricultural development, originating in Southeast Asia in the fourth century BCE, then moving into China, Arabia, Persia, and the Mediterranean throughout the Middle Ages. What Mintz discusses as a sugar revolution, really took of by the 1540s when it became an important colonial commodity in Madeira and São Tomé for the Portuguese and in the Canaries for the Spanish. It followed close on the heels of New World colonization, serving as a great trade commodity for the Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 11

Portuguese in coastal Brazil by the 1530s, in the Dutch West Indies a century later, for the British in Barbados and the French in Haiti by 1640, and for the Spanish in Cuba by the 1750s. And while the Cuban sugar industry evolved later than elsewhere in the region, it took of there with incredible speed, with nearly 1,500 mills processing sugar on the island in the mid-nineteenth century and providing a third of the world’s sugar supply by 1898. By the early twentieth century, sugar production represented 92 percent of Cuba’s economy. By then, the Cuban growers were competing with other sugar-pro- ducing regions around the world, including Malaya, Taiwan, the Philippines, Queensland (Australia), Hawai’i, Colombia, and Java.22 Java—the island from where we get that nickname for cofee—serves as another reminder of the transnational nature of world commodities and with a similar development trajectory as sugar. As its Latin name purports, Cofea arabica was frst cultivated in the Arabian Peninsula (or some suggest, the horn of Africa) and moved swiftly like, and with, sugar around the world as a fuel for the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Entire national economies, like those in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and El Salvador became dependent over time on cofee production and export and sufered from the whims of international markets and international diseases that strike cofee plantations, as is so often the case for “commodity hells.” Stuart McCook, for instance, has tracked the history of cofee rust, a disease as transnational as cofee itself.23 And in terms of labor, in Brazil, the cofee industry in the country’s southeast interior was at frst dependent on African slaves. Tat changed with abolition in the 1880s, and new waves of immigrants from Germany, Japan, and elsewhere internationalized Brazilian cofee even more. Te study of slavery itself has taken some important turns toward agricultural history in recent years. New histories are showing that in the American South slaves introduced new cultural connections, especially foodways, from Africa on which southerners soon became dependent. In their book, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World, Judith Carney and Richard Rosomof ofered compelling evidence on how slaves “African- ized” the food and health systems on plantations by introducing food, me- dicinal, and spiritual plants. Teir knowledge of rice-paddy farming became essential for food production, especially in South Carolina, and other plants or seeds that Africans creatively smuggled with them on the slave ships produced fber for clothing and cordage and garden plot crops for daily nutrition. Tus, the transnational foodways from enslaved Africans made signifcant contributions to the agricultural and economic development of the American 12 Agricultural History

South in the colonial and early national periods.24 Tis Africa-America connection, however, became a two-way street. By the beginning of the twentieth century, descendants of slaves began to bring facets of the southern cotton plantation complex to West Africa to advance economic development there. From the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Book- er T. Washington organized an expedition to the German colony of Togo to introduce cotton production, using German colonizers, Togolese laborers, Polish immigrants, and Tuskegee representatives to establish cotton as a cash crop for local use and export. Historian Andrew Zimmerman chronicled this transnational story in his book Alabama to Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. It illustrated the ris- ing economic power of a globalizing American South and how it could help shape and develop other areas of the world, as well as the triangular connections between Europe, Africa, and North America in very diferent ways than the slave trade represented centuries before. Equally important on this same topic is the multi-authored book Plantation Kingdom: Te American South and Its Global Commodities which examined sugar, cotton, rice, and tobacco and how those commodities helped to forge an international southern economy. But, as the authors of this book importantly note, due to slavery and heavy dependence on foreign markets, the South represented a “commodity hell,” an apt economic and social description carried into the twentieth century when overproduction and gluts characterized the region without much agricultural diversifcation.25 Te transnational history of cotton deserves our attention in this light. Before the abolition of slavery, cotton continued the Africa-to-the-Americas forced labor regime and continued the multi-continental trade patterns that had begun with New World sugar production. Likewise, demand for fber in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England’s robust textile industry not only spawned increased cotton production in the American South, but also in other parts of the world, especially India, and led to further increases when the US Civil War disrupted production in the South. Ten, investors in the United Kingdom looked to increase production in India and Egypt as well as in Latin America, especially Brazil and Nicaragua, where cotton for many decades fourished and greatly impacted local and regional economies and environments.26 When cotton returned on a more stable basis to the South, its constant enemy—the boll weevil, with its own transnational history originating in Mexico and moving into Texas and then the Deep South, as James Giesen has shown in Boll Weevil Blues—shifted cotton production westward, Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 13 into Mississippi, Arkansas, eastern Texas, Oklahoma, and eventually to the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.27 As a transplanted Oklahoman, I am especially intrigued by the transnational cotton industry that led to the creation of my adopted home state—a fact most people in Oklahoma assuredly would be surprised to learn as it is not clearly presented in state history textbooks. But when high British demand allowed for prices of raw cotton to double in the year 1815 (from 15 cents a pound to 30 cents in less than a year), hundreds of thousands of Americans from elsewhere in the growing United States raced to the Deep South to start growing cotton on any land they could get their hands on. From 1810 to 1820 cotton production in the region increased tenfold, and by 1820 the South had surpassed India as the world’s leading cotton producer. Meanwhile, in the ten-year period from 1827 to 1837 the number of banks in the United States doubled (from 333 to 729), which exponentially increased the availability of credit for new farmers in the South to put land into cotton production and to purchase slaves. Te only thing in the way of such growth were the American Indians still living in the region, many of whom had begun their own agricultural enterprises based on cotton and slavery. But Anglo invaders literally began to push the indigenous peoples of their land—often violently, prompting the Andrew Jackson administration to develop an Indian removal policy, supposedly based on the Indians’ own protection before they would be slaughtered by more incoming settlers. Jackson delivered his mes- sage “On Indian Removal” to Congress in 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act the same year, appropriated $500,000 for the War Department to implement it, and the government then opened land throughout the South for private acquisition (that profted the government more than the cost of removal). Speculators bought up most of the land and eventually sold parcels to settlers for high profts.28 Tus the Five Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muskogee (Creek), Choctaw, and Seminole—underwent removal down the various trails of tears in the 1830s, removal to Indian Territory that later became the eastern half of Oklahoma. Tey competed against other tribes already in the region, and when settled began new agricultural enterprises that became the basis of Indian Territory’s and Oklahoma’s cotton economy—completing the cycle of trade to the eastern United States and Britain for the booming textile industry. Tis transnational nature of commodity histories has been of great interest to me, and the trend to explore it more deeply within agricultural history has grown quickly in the last few years. A veritable cottage industry of commodity 14 Agricultural History histories evolved in the late twentieth century, some more academically oriented than others, some demonstrating international commodity webs more so than others, and many with pithy one-word main titles. Tellingly, several of the titles in this body of literature deal with “empires” created by certain commodities, and many deal with how a specifc commodity changed, transformed, or even rescued the world.29 I have been especially interested in how King Henequen from Mexico reigned to provide fber for cordage across North America.30 Te agave plants henequen and sisal, from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, yielded the right kind of fber to make binder twine, that essential component of grain harvesting with binders that cut the grain stalks and tied them into sheaves or bundles to await threshing that farmers throughout the United States and Canada (and elsewhere in grain-growing regions of the world) used before the availability and afordability of combine harvesters. Tus, as I worked to show in Bound in Twine, a double dependency ensued in which henequen growers in Mexico became dependent on grain farmers in the transnational Great Plains, and grain farmers there were dependent on Yucatecan henequen producers from the 1880s to 1950. Te two-edged dependency resulted in a variety of social, labor, economic, and environmental changes throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada, ones that were worthy of our attention for both historical reasons and as signposts for similar economic, labor, and environmental ram- ifcations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between these same three countries, which was enacted in 1994 and revised in late 2018.31 Te transnational fber connections for binder twine, however, were not limited to North America—they extended over to Asia, providing a fascinating inroad in which to understand how the Pacifc World connected into globalized agriculture. In the Philippines, growers produced an even better quality of fber for binder twine, albeit more expensive to import due to distance: abaca. Also called manila hemp, although in no way related to industrial or recreational cannabis, abaca comes from the rasped fber from the stems of Musa textilis plants, which are related to banana plants but do not produce an edible fruit.32 Te abaca industry and its links to North American grain growing remind us how the Philippines had long been connected to international markets. Going back to the early modern period, imperial Spain valued Asian trade via its Manila Galleon, a twice-a-year feet from 1565 to 1815 that took goods via Manila to Acapulco and then on to other ports in the Spanish New World Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 15 and Europe, on ships whose sails were made from Philippine abaca. Te trade was transregional and highly agricultural: the galleon carried cotton from India and Luzon, spices from the Molluccas, abaca from the Philippines, opi- um and sandalwood from China, and silk from China and Japan, along with other Asian commodities. During the same time Mexico, whose mines in Zacatecas were the world’s leading silver producers, sent specie to China on the westward return trips. Te collapse of the Chinese paper money system by the 1450s, caused in part due to its uselessness for trade beyond China, created a robust market for Latin American silver. On the other end, while Spain sponsored the Manila Galleon, it was German banks and lending houses that funded the merchant feet. Further south, the Andes produced silver, shipping out of Peru to Mexico and then on to Asia. Mexico also exported agricultural commodities. All this trade created new markets on both sides of the world and yielded fantastic profts for the Spanish, especially as the Crown charged high taxes on incoming merchandise.33 Te agricultural history of this transnational trade network should not go underreported. Te Manila Galleon served as a vessel for the Columbian Exchange, particularly with the introduction of crops from Spanish Ameri- ca into Asia. Sweet potatoes and peanuts especially became important crops to Filipinos, with corn and other fruits and vegetables from the Americas entering the Philippine diet. Sweet potatoes in fact became the third-most important food crop in the Philippines (after sugar and rice) and contributed signifcantly to the islands’ rapid population growth, including the increase of Chinese immigrants who worked in the galleon shipyards.34 As the centuries moved along, abaca remained a strong commodity in worldwide trade, in large part due to its strategic utility. A botanical study called abaca “the world’s foremost cordage fber,” especially for marine use as its resistance to salt water rendered it perfect for making naval rope, rigging, and fshing nets, as well as for textiles, especially as fabric that native Filipi- nos used for clothing.35 As the best fber for marine cordage, it was in high demand across North America and Europe, becoming especially popular with British and US ropeworks. During the US Civil War, a shortage of other f- bers caused papermakers to use recycled rope to make what became known as “manila folders.” Demand for naval rope increased even faster during the two World Wars. Allied forces in World War II knew they would need massive amounts of fber to make enough rope for the thousands of ships that were being made for the war efort. Tus, the US government, along with the Unit- ed Fruit Company of Boston experimented with abaca plantings in Panama, 16 Agricultural History the US Canal Zone, and Honduras—in similar tropical conditions and at similar latitudes to abaca plantations in the Philippines. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the abaca efort in the Americas grew even stronger, with plantations developed throughout Central America and Brazil made possible by the importation of abaca rhizomes from the Philippines. Because abaca is so closely related to bananas, the developers discovered it could grow well in former banana plantation lands. Today, that trend has continued with the abaca industry thriving in Costa Rica and Ecuador, competing with Phil- ippine growers.36 Tus, while the war industry broke the Philippine monopoly on abaca fber, it propelled abaca development even further transnationally. In the private sector, contractors used abaca roping in the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam during the Great Depression, for ropes used in the mines and for oil rigs in the American West, and as mentioned above, for the best binder twine (often blended with henequen or sisal) for the grain industry on the American and Canadian Plains. When demand for twine fell due to increased combine harvesting (with no need to tie sheaves) by 1950, abaca producers discovered a variety of other uses for the fber, unlike the Mexican fber industry that struggled to fnd long-term alternative markets for sisal and henequen and went into steep decline with the advance of the combine. Today abaca is in high demand not only for ropes and packing twine, but also for carpets and rugs, hammocks and mats, upholstery material, patio furniture, fberboard and other building materials, and specialty paper for cigarettes and cofee flters. German and British manufacturers of such products have become the abaca industry’s leading customers and thriving fber production in the Philippines has been a boon to local and national employment. By 2007 the country was supplying 85 percent of the world’s abaca fber, making it one of the Philippines’ greatest contributions to world trade worth nearly $80 million a year, and providing work to 1.5 million Filipino farmers, fber strippers and classifers, processors, and traders. Likewise, abaca as an endemic plant to the Philippines helps to conserve environmental protection as the crop depletes very few soil nutrients, leaves little physical and chemical residue in processing, helps to prevent erosion and preserves water resources where planted, and aids in biodiversity protection when intercropped with other commodities like coconut palms. Finally, products made of abaca consume less energy in their production than similar products made from other materials and can be recycled several times more than wood pulp.37 It is thus an extremely promising agricultural commodity on many transnational, economic, and ecological levels that warrants Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 17 our scholarly attention.38 And what sugar and cotton meant for the interconnections of Atlantic World history, abaca adds an intriguing agricultural case study to the important developing feld of Pacifc World, or Pacifc Rim, history.39 Historian Matt Matsuda noted that the oceanic region was hardly “an empty expanse,” but rather was a “crowded world of transitions, intersections, and transformed cultures.” He argued that specifc histories here only “take on full meaning when linked with other stories and places,” representing the “interconnectedness of other worlds,” much like I am suggesting here regarding Philippine abaca.40 Important studies in agricultural history have clearly illustrated these concepts and connections. For example, Cecilia Tsu’s Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California’s Santa Clara Valley, Gregory Cushman’s Guano and the Opening of the Pacifc World: A Global Eco- logical History, and Edward Melillo’s Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscover- ing the Chile-California Connection worked in compelling ways to illustrate trans-Pacifc agricultural intersections. Cushman showed how Peruvian guano enabled agricultural production all over Europe and North America and fos- tered competitive natural fertilizer industries in various parts of the Pacifc. Melillo explored how the California gold felds were dependent on the introduction of Chilean wheat and alfalfa to feed miners, and conversely, how the Chilean fruit and wine industry was dependent on California fruit varieties and agricultural technologies. In a fascinating newer study entitled “Land- scapes of Migration,” Ben Nobbs-Tiessen has detailed the history of how the Bolivian government earmarked Santa Cruz district in the lowlands of eastern Bolivia for agricultural development, encouraging Mennonites from Mexico and Belize and immigrants from Okinawa, along with indigenous Bolivians from the northern highlands to settle in the region. Tis is fascinating transregional, transnational, and trans-Pacifc World agricultural history, and it thrills me such a topic won the Agricultural History Society’s Gilbert Fite Award for best dissertation in 2016.41 Closer to home back in the United States, two books that came out in 2016 stand out as models of agricultural history with international ties, even though transnationality is not the principal focus of the works: Peter Kopp’s Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and Tom Okie’s Te Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the Amer- ican South. Both books demonstrate how regional agricultural areas within a state succeeded due to the international ties with horticultural development and markets. Hoptopia illustrated the uniqueness of the Willamette Valley 18 Agricultural History for hops production, how hops there came to have worldwide fame, and how European breweries came to covet and import them for the best-tasting beers. For Georgia peaches, Okie traced a pomicultural history back to Asian and European strains as well as to international horticulturalists who engineered the Elberta variety. Te fruit trees, their developers, and other advocates came to Georgia from outside the state and nation. In keeping with newer and wel- come trends in our discipline, Okie includes ample discussion of race, class, and gender as those concepts apply to peach development in the state. And as his subtitle suggested, Te Georgia Peach blends agricultural and environmental history in ways that I hope other scholars will emulate. In fact, he wrote that the book “is at heart a story about the power of environmental beauty.” Let that concept sink in: the power of something beautiful in nature, even though there were so many layers of agronomy and agricultural engineering involved with peach orchard development, there is still beauty and power in a delicious Georgia peach. Tus, when Okie rhetorically asked readers at both the beginning and end of his book if they “would care for a Georgia peach?” I must answer, yes, Tom, I would! Always.42 Likewise, borderlands history has met with agricultural history recently in interesting ways that further illustrates the transnationality of our feld. For example, Benny Andrés’ Power and Control in the Imperial Valley: Na- ture, Agribusiness, and Workers in the California Borderland, 1900–1940 is a blended study of irrigation, agricultural development, labor history, and social change on both sides of the line that splits California from Baja California. Tim Bowman’s Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Tex- as Borderlands explores the development of the citrus industry in the lower Rio Grande Valley, and especially how it was dependent on investment and farmer migration from the American Midwest, on labor from Mexico, and on national markets. In a similar vein, my edited volume Farming across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West studies a variety of dif- ferent agricultural, commodity, ranching, and irrigation histories in both the US-Mexican and US-Canadian borderlands. And Nick Johnson’s Grass Roots: A History of Cannabis in the American West is an intriguing study of marijuana production that transcends the US-Mexico border and the western United States.43 Other studies are showing more labor connections with Mexico and the American South, especially in terms of the growth of the poultry industry in the region. Steve Shrifer’s exposé Chicken: Te Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food and Perla Guerrero’s Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 19 and the Remaking of Place (especially her chapter on the polleras—immigrant women chicken-industry workers) ofered vital information and analysis on the role of Mexican workers to the South and how cultural changes are occur- ring rapidly in the region with the infux of these immigrant workers.44 Histo- rians will argue that these trends are hardly new. From the 1940s to the early 1960s there was a diferent fow of Mexican migrant workers to the South, particularly to Arkansas, in the Braceros program. More known for their feld work during World War II (and thereafter) in the American West and South- west, los braceros also were instrumental to the cotton industry in the Arkansas Delta, as a variety of newer studies are showing and with the same kinds of transnational connections that are so important to understand.45 And of course, the same is true for the Mexican and Latin American presence in the American Midwest, especially with the importance of migrant labor for the Midwestern sugar beet and meat packing industries. Entire communities, like Dodge City and Garden City, Kansas; Guymon, Oklahoma; Scottsbluf, Nebraska; Marshalltown, Iowa; and the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota have changed demographically and socially with the infux of Latino workers who for decades now have established their own agricultural communities in this region.46 Yet, assuredly as most readers will know, wages for immigrant laborers in agriculture have remained abysmally low. As Jim Hightower has reported, even if/when these migrant workers receive mini- mum wage (which is not always the case), most earn less than $17,500 a year and “are often ‘housed’ in shacks, old chicken coops, shipping containers, and squalid motels.” He noted, “every decade or so, America’s mass media are surprised to discover that migrant farmworkers are still being miserably paid and despicably treated by the industry that profts from their labor. Stories run, the public is outraged (again), assorted ofcials pledge action, then … nothing.”47 What role do we have in agricultural history to acknowledge this plight and continue to research, report, and analyze it? Not all of these trends in agricultural historiography across the Americas that I am applauding here deal with specifc crops, commodities, or migrant labor. Some innovative new studies are tracing transnational agricultural connections via technological and political transfers between nations. Eve Buck- ley, in Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Northwest Brazil, for example, analyzed technology transfer via the New Dealers from the Franklin Roosevelt administration whom Brazilian technocrats invited to their country’s sertão (interior northeastern hinterlands) for advice and com- parative ideas on dams, irrigation, and agrarian and social development to 20 Agricultural History help bring the Northeast out of poverty and drought. Te Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was especially of interest to the Brazilians as a supposed model of modernization for the lesser-developed and plantation-oriented American South and how some of the TVA’s programs could be transferred to help farmers, especially landless tenant ones, in the sertão. Tat many of the hydro projects in Brazil did not produce the anticipated economic changes, and, like in the South, did not diminish class and economic disparities, is part of Buckley’s important concluding analysis.48 Similarly, Tore Olsson’s prize-winning book Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside ofered valuable new data and analysis on the history of ideological exchanges in the 1930s and 1940s between the United States during the New Deal and Mexico during the reform era of President Lázaro Cárdenas. However, as Olsson discovered, diferent in this history was a robust two-way street between the two countries that yielded American agricultural technology transfer to Mexico and ideological transfer on agricultural reform from Mexico to the United States, particularly to the South. Te liberal land reform policies enacted in Mexico by Cárdenas seemed attractive to New Dealers looking to reform agricultural policies in the South, and in some ways led to the creation of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937, which was designed to enable southern tenant farmers access to credit to purchase land, often damaged, with the idea for them to turn it into good farmland. Olsson thus ofered an important corrective to our understanding of New Deal agricultural policies, one in which Mexico played an important role.49 Tese important examples in the transnational turn that our discipline has taken should make all of us in agricultural history proud, especially as we continue to reach out to scholars in other disciplines and areas. But certainly, there are other trends in agriculture to which we should continue to be alert. And it often takes journalists, politicians, and activists to attract our attention to such matters. In this Age of Agricultural Ignorance, we should be ever mindful of the impact of industrial agriculture, or what Hightower referred to as “agri-culture” versus “agri-industry,” that he so poignantly de- fned as “the conglomerized, Wall Street-ized, monopolized, and plasticized model of treating dinner as just another manufactured product.” For example, as he pointed out, a small group of wealthy investors controls 65 percent of all agricultural lands in the world.50 Likewise, many industrial crops and meats rely on an incredible amount of water, often controlled by conglomerate in- terests. National Geographic reported on this situation a few years ago, showing Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 21 the following water requirements to produce certain industrial agricultural products:

1 almond: 1 gallon of water 1 walnut: 5 gallons 1 head of lettuce: 12 gallons 1 cluster of grapes: 24 gallons 1 chicken egg: 53 gallons 1 pound of chicken: 468 gallons 1 gallon of milk: 880 gallons 1 pound of beef: 1,800 gallons 1 pound of dark chocolate: 3,170 gallons51

On the other hand, there is indeed a concerted efort to counter this corporate agriculture/food scenario in the United States. As there was a century ago, when Cornell University horticulturalist Liberty Hyde Bailey sounded a wake-up call about the industrialized efects of capitalism on farming in those days, prompting the development of his Country Life Commission and his support for government-supported agricultural extension services, there is today a signifcant move for change. Perhaps Americans are becoming less agriculturally ignorant than we think, especially when we consider this counter-industrial initiative, sometimes referred to as the Good Food Uprising. Having warned against the corporate model, Hightower is enthused by this newer movement, stating that it is “the fastest growing segment of the food economy, creating the alternative model of local, sustainable, small-scale, com- munity-based, organic, humane, healthy, democratic—and tasty—food system for all.” Te Good Food Uprising is a nationwide grassroots coalition made up of family farmers, consumer advocate organizations, environmental groups, labor unions, and churches.52 Rural Kentucky poet, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry, who has been at the forefront of the uprising, suggests that “eating is a profound, political act. It lets you and me vote for the … industrial model or choose to go back to the future of agri-culture, which is the art and science of cooperating with, rather than overwhelming, nature.”53 Indeed, Americans have voted by consuming. By 2017 the coalition could see visible successes in its work, when organic farming was up by 6 percent over previous years, with an increase of nearly ffteen thousand registered organic farms across the country. Sales of organically produced foods in the same year were up by 11 percent over previous years, for a net worth of $43 22 Agricultural History billion annually—a fgure that was up four times more than sales for conven- tionally produced foods. And the use of genetically modifed (GMO) seeds and crops by that same year registered a signifcant decrease, with farmers cutting the planting of GMO crops by 5.4 million acres and reducing the sale of GMO seeds by $400 million. Likewise, reports indicate an expanded base for such changes, with polls showing that 91 percent of American consumers support local farmers, 89 percent support reducing exposure to pesticides in food, 90 percent support GMO labels on food products, and 84 percent support better living conditions for livestock.54 Let’s specifcally look at livestock and meat production. Cattle grazing represents the most widespread agricultural practice in the world, dependent on signifcant grasslands on every continent except Antarctica. It is also one of the most ecologically destructive agricultural practices with overgrazing, especially during droughty years, causing serious deterioration of grasslands, steppes, savannas, and prairies. Recognizing such conditions during 1930s and 1940s, New Dealers such as Hugh Hammond Bennett in the Franklin Roosevelt administration pushed for soil conservation districts and worked to pass range management policies like the Taylor Grazing Act to restore American grasslands. Yet by the 1980s many of the grazing lands across the United States were in crisis conditions due to overgrazing. It was then that Allan Savory, a Rhodesian (now Zimbabwean) wildlife biologist and farmer, moved to the United States and was highly concerned about the deteriorat- ing conditions of grazing lands in the Great Plains and the American West. Drawing upon his knowledge of ungulate grazing in Africa, Savory founded the Center for Holistic Resource Management in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to promote the healing and restoration of American grasslands. Te center’s advocacy and instructions on “planned grazing” and “holistic management” became popular with ranchers in the West, especially when they perceived both the economic and environmental advantages of Savory’s methods. Te key was in increasing, not decreasing, grazing, with Savory arguing that cattle herds had to be better managed to encourage intensive grazing that imitated the herds of ungulates in Africa’s savannas, where hoof action for mulching and ample manuring led to pasture restoration. His work showed how this program of intensive grazing was similar to the history of bison efects on the Great Plains, replete with hoof mulching via large numbers of animals running and stampeding in the grasslands. Tus, in the absence of bison, cattle needed to be managed more efciently on grazing lands, that is, led to graze intensively in one area, then moved often to other felds to keep the Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 23 cycle going. He claimed this led to a holistic process, including research and adaptations to local ecological conditions and with the inclusion of local communities, cultures, and economies—just as the grazing systems in rural Africa have worked for generations.55 Savory’s theories have been proven successful by thousands of ranchers throughout the United States, and in important ways represent not only other transnational connections to American agriculture, but also innovative and environmentally sound noncorporate solutions to livestock and beef production. Some will argue that more sustainable grazing is missing the point about beef. Te water use for cattle as listed in the table above (1,800 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef ), the grain required for the beef industry, the carbon footprint of cattle raising, along with range overgrazing, and health-related problems due to consumption of beef and cow’s milk, are reasons enough for many people to push strongly for changes to American agriculture and diet. Options vary from vegetarianism, an avoidance of red meat, and the consumption of more goat meat and dairy products. In contrast to beef, it takes only 127 gallons of water to produce a pound of goat meat, which has signifcantly less fat content than beef. Likewise, goat milk is easier to digest than cow’s milk, is homogenized naturally, and rarely produces cases of lactose intolerance. Finally, goats browse instead of graze, taking a far lower environmental toll on natural landscapes. All of this can be attested to by the popularity of goat meat and milk in most of the world, but it is up against cultural stigmas in the United States (except by people of Southern European, Asian, African, and Latin American ethnicities).56 Aquaculture represents another sound meat and protein alternative to beef. In fact, in 2011 world farmed fsh production overtook beef production for the frst time—66 million tons of fsh compared to 63 million tons of beef—according to a study conducted by the Earth Policy Institute. And while farmed fsh also requires grain (usually soybeans) for fsh meal, per pound of meat produced it is the lowest of all meats—2 pounds of grain per pound of fsh (compared to beef at 7 pounds, pork at 3.5 pounds, and poultry at 2.5 pounds). Naturally, not all that glitters is gold with fsh. Farmed salmon and shrimp require fsh meal and fsh oil for feed, further depleting already strained anchovy and sardine fsheries.57 Likewise, there is an enor- mous carbon footprint to the industry, especially with the seafood industry in the United States, which imports the vast majority of its supply from abroad. Ninety percent of all seafood sold in the States is imported, coming an average distance of 5,475 miles; and more specifcally for shrimp—the most 24 Agricultural History popular American seafood—despite abundance in US waters, we import 94 percent of all shrimp consumed from an average of 8,000 miles away. Worse, the United States conducts very limited inspections on these imports, equaling less than 2 percent of all imported seafood. Studies show that imported seafood often is infected with high rates of bacterial contamination, especially coming in from Vietnam (58 percent), Ecuador (61 percent), Indonesia (69 percent), India (74 percent), and Bangladesh (83 percent).58 For much of the world (except in Jewish and Muslim cultures), pork is the meat of choice and a sound alternative to beef, especially with its high grain- to-meat ratio. But in the agri-industrial world of US pork production, millions of hogs—90 percent of American sows—are raised in confned animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and mechanical sow birthing operations that Jim Hightower has called “industrial hell.” He explained,

Troughout pregnancy, sows are immobilized, jammed into row after row of two-foot-wide “gestation crates.” Unable even to turn around, they basically lose their minds, forlornly chewing on the bars of their cages or dejectedly waving their heads back and forth. For giving birth, they’re briefy moved into slightly larger furrowing crates (although they are still unable to turn around).Tey are quickly deprived of their piglets, reimpregnated, and returned to the brutality of the gestation crates.

But as he further pointed out, the Good Food Uprising’s grassroots eforts have made impressive inroads to halt such conditions. Joining with animal rights groups like the Humane Society, they successfully pressured such food giants as Whole Foods, Burger King, McDonald’s, Oscar Meyer, Costco, and even Walmart to reject all CAFO pork.59 Similarly horrible conditions exist in the industrial poultry world. Reve- lations of hundreds of millions of hens being raised in windlowless “battery cages” (fve laying hens packed tightly together per cage) where they can hardly move or spread their wings, where they are denied access to the outdoors and sunlight and given supplements to grow their breasts so heavy they cannot even lift them—such revelations caused animal rights groups, especially Compassion for World Farming, and the various coalitions of the Good Food Uprising to protest against industrial chicken corporations. With demand astronomically high (i.e. Americans annually consume seventy-seven billion chicken eggs and about ninety-two chickens per person; in the world, ff- ty-fve million chickens are consumed daily), and with continued pressure for change, some poultry corporations are moving toward cage-free hens. Perdue Farms, the fourth largest poultry producer in the United States, for example, Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 25 announced in July 2017 that it was moving toward more humane practices, including making sure hens got sunlight and space to run and fap their wings, which actually led to reductions in production costs and attracted Perdue to a wider market of supermarket chains, restaurants, and families demanding better chicken. California voters passed a cage-free chicken initiative back in 2008, which helped convince Burger King, McDonald’s, IHOP, Kroger, Costco, Meijer, and Trader Joe’s to switch to using or selling cage-free eggs only. And as Hightower has reported, even Walmart—“the biggest prize in all eggdom … America’s biggest egg buyer, announced its transition to a 100 percent cage-free egg supply by 2025.”60 With these kinds of changes in pork and poultry sparked by consumer interest groups, protesters, and families vot- ing at their favorite supermarkets and restaurants, indeed a strong argument can be made that Americans’ agricultural ignorance is waning fast, and these areas could be ripe for studies in agricultural history for years to come. However, as we consumers consume, we continue to waste agricultural products at incredible rates. A 2016 report by Te Guardian’s environmental correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg indicated that Americans throw away almost half as much food as they eat (40 to 50 percent of all agricultural produce), mainly due to a “cult of perfection … unrealistic and unyielding cos- metic standards.” Much of this produce grown in the United States is left in the felds or orchards to rot, fed to livestock, or hauled to landflls, “high-value and nutritious food … being sacrifced to retailers’ demand for unattainable perfection.” Often harvesters will just abandon the slightly blemished fruits and vegetables right in the feld to save the expense of labor, or the produce is left to rot in warehouses, even though minor blemishes have no efect on quality or freshness. On the global level, the waste rates are equally alarm- ing, especially in a world with so many areas sufering famine and starvation. Goldenberg reports that about one third of all food production in the world is wasted, equaling about 1.6 billion tons of produce a year with a value of nearly $1 trillion. Tere is growing awareness of the problem, however, as organizations like the United Nations, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and even the Obama administration in the early 2010s pledged eforts to halve this rate of waste and food destruction.61 On the global level, agricultural dumping should be of equal concern to food scholars, agricultural policy makers, and to us agricultural historians. Dumping, the ofcial term of the General Agreement on Tarifs and Trade (GATT), occurs when agricultural trading corporations dump commodities onto the export market—especially bound for countries in the Global South 26 Agricultural History in need of food—not so much out of generosity and good will to hungry nations, but due to prices for those crops being below the cost of production. According to an important study conducted by the Institute for Agricul- ture and Trade Policy in 2015, for example, producers exported wheat at 32 percent less than the cost of production, corn at 12 percent less, soybeans at 10 percent less, and rice at 2 percent less. But this dumping of commodities harms local farmers in the receiving countries by unfair competition—selling grains for below the price they can produce it themselves. It has led to economic instability in nations dependent on agricultural trade (for local consumption or export), and thus has caused signifcant tension in international trade. Dumping also hurts US farmers and producers by selling commodities at below production costs. Much of the cause for this dilemma is the US policy of encouraging overproduction, including the 1996 Farm Bill during the Bill Clinton administration that urged farmers “to feed a hungry world” often with government subsidies, using exports as an escape valve for falling grain prices. But for receiving countries the practice is disastrous, as illustrated with the case of dumped rice on Haiti in the 2010s, especially after the devastating earthquake of 2010 there that destroyed so much of the country’s agriculture and infrastructure. Dumping ended up destroying rural livelihoods for thousands of Haitian farmers, while much of the dumped commodities never reached the people in need.62 A few years ago, Agricultural History Society President Anne Efand in her published presidential address visited the problem of agricultural dumping, using the example of cotton in West Africa, and listing it as one of the “wicked problems” she perceived in agriculture. She cited how the international organization Oxfam’s campaign to end subsidized cotton dumping in that region was premised on the fact that massive cotton imports from the United States cut into “the vital importance of cash from small-scale cotton production to meet the needs for poor farm families for education, medical care, and investment in food production.”63 Since then (2009), dumping has increased, and even more so under NAFTA and especially with the Farm Bill’s price supports of subsidized corn for US farmers. For Mexico, it led to millions of farmers abandoning their farms, moving to urban areas in search of work, converting their farms to grow marijuana or poppies for the drug cartels, or immigrating—legally or not—to the United States.64 As a study in Public Citizen reported, “Such dumping spells disaster for farmers and small- scale producers who cannot compete with the unrealistically low prices created by government bailouts in the wealthy Global North.” Worse, much of the Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 27 commodities dumped on the international market are known as “irradiated foods”—produce or grains that have been zapped with X-rays to extend shelf- life for surplus storage and may not meet national or international standards for imported food. Begun during the Dwight Eisenhower administration’s “Atoms for Peace Program” in 1953, irradiated food was meant to be a friendly result of the nuclear era and another way to feed a starving world. Yet it comes with health hazards and economic and trade policies against which developing nations in the Global South cannot compete.65 But much of this agricultural production may soon be moot due to another important problem in US agriculture about which we absolutely must be aware: Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the industry name for the hazard- ous decline in numbers of pollinating bees. Te honeybee decline in the Unit- ed States has been steady since the end of World War II when the chemical industry developed toxic pesticides and in the years since due to massive feld conversion to industrial agriculture. Te number of bee hives dropped from 6 million in 1947 to 4.5 million in 1980 and to 2.4 million by 2008. In 2014 US beekeepers lost an astounding 40 percent of their pollinating bee population, with much of the loss attributed to Dow Agroscience’s neurotoxic pesticide sulfoxafor. Tat decline represents a loss of about one-third of all the honeybees in the last few years and represents a signifcant agricultural problem since honeybees pollinate over one hundred diferent crops (fruits, vegetables, nuts, and feld crops), representing about one third of all the food Americans eat. It has also indicated a signifcant drop in the production of honey. In terms of economics, if this decline continues, the United States could lose up to $15 billion in agricultural production, let alone the reduction in food and nutrition diversity.66 However, as I have indicated elsewhere in this article, there is good news to report on the CCD front, and much of it is the result of activism from diferent environmental and legal organizations, and from members of the Good Food Uprising. While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Obama administration had approved Dow’s sulfoxafor in 2013, two years later a federal appeals court in California reversed the EPA approval, and handed a strong rebuke to the agency. Te case, argued strongly by Earth- Justice, ended with a decision that ruled pesticides must be judged by their impact on bees and on the health of hives.67 Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has become actively involved in eforts to stem the tide of CCD. Te agency has invested $20 million for a fve-year study of the causes of CCD and another $8 million for farmer incentives to establish more 28 Agricultural History hives on their lands. Currently, fve states in the Northern Plains and Great Lakes regions (North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Mich- igan) are home to more than half of all the commercial honeybee population, and with plans in gear to increase the number of hives in those states.68 Well, if the program fails and we continue to run short on food, to the res- cue is technical entrepreneur Jinsoo An, who has developed something called Gastronomic Virtual Reality (GVR), which is a simulated dining experience, or rather, a food future without actual food. Instead, nutrients would come from low-calorie substances like agar, konjac jelly, and gum arabic, that An calls “Project Nourished.” Te idea is to enjoy the pleasures of food without the calories. He promises that GVR would create a complete sensory experience with virtual reality headsets, aromatic difusers, 3-D printed food, virtual cocktail glasses, and cutlery with sensors that will fool our brains into think- ing we are eating steak, lasagna, pie, and many other real foods.69 While GVR is hardly the answer to any problems in agriculture or food culture, it can give us pause to consider the value of technology in this digital world and what it can mean for the consumption of food and commodities. For those of us in agricultural history, however, it is once again the USDA that is also in this digital technology forefront, especially with its Economic Research Service (ERS) and the work it has done to create a variety of extremely useful digital atlases. I encourage all readers here, especially those who will fnd this useful for classroom instruction—and I hope that is many of you!—to visit the ERS’s Atlas website (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data- products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx) for such important tools as the food access atlas, the food desert atlas, the food security atlas, the food and health atlas, and others that show food distribution and other agricultural, rural, and food lifeways data across the United States. Tese USDA resources will continue to diminish the Age of Agricultural Ignorance. We as agricultural historians can continue doing our part, as well. With better understandings of how commodities connect to our daily lives, how they have had and continue to have important transnational connections to remind us of the globalized world of agriculture and food within which we live, and for us to keep up on current agricultural issues are ways all of us, I believe, can reach out to students, scholars, and the general public to show that we care about the importance of agricultural education. And the trends that I have identifed here, along with some signifcant concerns that will be the topics for agricultural history conferences and studies for years to come, will identify us as a body of scholars eager to accept the challenge of keeping Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 29 agriculture and its history relevant into the middle of the twenty-frst century and beyond.

NOTES

1. Baxter Black, “Growth of Agricultural Ignorance,” syndicated column as published in the Norman [OK] Transcript, June 16, 2015, A4. 2. Statistics and quotation are from Black, ibid; and Sophia Murphy and Karen Han- sen-Kuhn, “Counting the Costs of Agricultural Dumping,” (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, June 2017), at https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/fles/2017-06/2017_06_26_Dumping- Paper.pdf (All URLs accessed Dec. 14, 2018). 3. Black, “Growth of Agricultural Ignorance,” 4. For more detailed analysis of the labor-nature relationship, see Richard White, Te Organic Machine: Te Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); and Gunther Peck, “Te Nature of Labor: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labor History,” Environmental History 11, no. 2 (Apr. 2006): 212–38. 4. Jeremy Vetter, Field Life: Science in the American West in the Railroad Era (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 17, 31. 5. Figures for the United States from 2010 Census of Population and Housing, CPH-2–5 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofce, U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). Figures for Canada from Statistics Canada found at https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/start. 6. Mike Hanlon, “World Population Becomes More Urban than Rural,” New Atlas, May 29, 2007, https://newatlas.com/go/7334/. 7. Baxter Black, “High-horned Red Cow’s Calf,” syndicated column as published in the Norman [OK] Transcript, Apr. 4, 2017, A-4. 8. Jim Hightower, “Te 2017 State of the Plate: Sustaining the Push to a Healthy, Humane, and Human-Scale Food System,” Te Hightower Lowdown 19 ( Jan. 2017): 1. 9. A. Hope Jahren, “Te Farmers We Forgot,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 2016, SR8. 10. Hightower, “State of the Plate,” 1. 11. Jahren, “Te Farmers We Forgot,” SR8 (Warren quotation cited by Jahren). 12. Ibid. 13. Sara M. Gregg, “Cultivating an Agro-Environmental History,” in A Companion to Amer- ican Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 425. 14. Important exceptions to this trend, and infuential ones in my own development in environmental and agricultural history, were Donald Worster’s seminal essays “Beyond the Agrarian Myth” and “Cowboy Ecology,” both of which were reprinted in Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Worster, Dust Bowl: Te Southern Plains in the 1930s, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). For more on the connections between environmental, agricultural, and food history, see my own previous work, Sterling Evans, “Agricultural Production and Environmental Histo- ry,” in Te Oxford Handbook of Food History, ed. Jefrey M. Pilcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 209–26. A more recent work that stands out in the intersection of environmental, agricultural, and food history is William Tomas Okie’s Te Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and the Environment in the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 15. J. H. Fabre, as quoted in John T. Schlebecker, Whereby We Trive: A History of American Farming, 1607–1972 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975), 1. 16. For more insights on these philosophers and their ideas of agriculture, labor, and state 30 Agricultural History formation, see Charles S. Maier, Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), esp. 131, 195. 17. For further analysis on Tolstoy in this light, see Roman Krznaric, How Should We Live? Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life (Katonah, NY: BlueBridge, 2013). Te Tolstoy quotation is taken from a translated version in Revista Nacional de Agricultura (Colombia) 15, no. 201 (Mar. 1921): 292. 18. An important inroad into the connections between environmental history and agricultural history occurred at the 2006 Western History Association conference in St. Louis, Missouri, with the insightful roundtable titled “Working Fertile Ground: Environmental and Agricultural History in the New Millennium.” Panelists included Donald Worster, Donald Pisani, Claire Strom, Deborah Fitzgerald, Mark Fiege, and Douglas Helms. For more on these connections, see Gregg, “Cultivating an Agro-Environmental History;” Worster, “Beyond the Agrarian Myth;” and Evans, “Agricultural Production and Environmental History.” 19. Sterling Evans, “Te International Context for Rural America,” in Te Routledge History of Rural America, ed. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (New York: Routledge, 2016), 332. 20. For excellent analysis on commodities and globalization, see Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, Te World that Trade Created: Culture, Society and the World Economy, 1400–1918 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Willem van Schendel, ed., Embedding Agricultural Commodities: Using Historical Evidence, 1840s–1940s (New York: Routledge, 2017); and Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 21. Sydney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: Te Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985). For sugar’s importance in the American South, see J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: Te Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753–1950 (Lexington: University of Ken- tucky Press, 1953); and Richard Follett, Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). 22. Michael van der Linden, “Globalization’s Agricultural Roots: Some Final Consider- ations,” in Embedding Agricultural Commodities, 146–89. See also Horacio Crespo, “Trade Re- gimes and the International Sugar Market, 1850–1980: Protectionism, Subsidies, and Regula- tion,” in From Silver to Cocaine, 147–74. Te history of the development of the sugar industry in Colombia is yet to be told but is also in a great way very transnational in scope. Started in the 1880s by James Eder, a Prussian entrepreneur and immigrant to Colombia’s Cauca Valley (where he correctly believed sugar cane would fourish), the development of cane production and sugar mills was dependent on overseas innovations and markets. I am in the beginning stages of studying this transnational story and presented on it at the 2018 Agricultural History Society conference. See Sterling Evans, “Colombian Cane: Te Sugar Industry in the Valle del Cauca, Colombia, and Its Transnational Connections” (forthcoming). 23. See William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, eds., Te Global Cofee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Stephen Topik and Mario Samper, “Te Latin American Cofee Commodity Chain: Brazil and Costa Rica,” in From Silver to Cocaine, 118–46. For rust, see Stuart McCook, Cofee Is Not Forever: A History of Cofee Rust Disease (Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming). 24. Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomof, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 2, 4. For more on African rice, see Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: Te African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). For more on African diet contributions to the circum-Caribbean region, see Candice Goucher, Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food (London: Routledge, 2013). 25. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 31 the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Richard Follett, Sven Beckert, Peter Coclanis, and Barbara Hahn, Plantation Kingdom: Te American South and Its Global Commodities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 26. A good starting point for this history is Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014). 27. See James C. Giesen, Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 28. Tis information and analysis are expertly explained in Calvin Schermerhorn, “‘Te Time Is Just Arrived When Many Capitalists Will Make Fortunes’: Indian Removal, Finance, and Slavery in the Making of the American Cotton South,” in Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands, eds. Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2015). 29. For interested readers, the theoretical place to start is with Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume Te Social Life of Tings: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). A beginner’s list of commodity histories includes Elizabeth Abbott, Sugar: A Bittersweet History (New York: Te Overlook Press, 2009); Sophie Cox, Te True History of Chocolate (London: Tames and Hudson, 1996); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Penguin, 2002); Jack Turner, Spice: Te History of a Temptation (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Roy Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003); Alan MacFarlane, Te Empire of Tea: Te Asian Leaf that Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2004); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: Te History of Cofee and How it Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Stewart Lee Allen, Te Devil’s Cup: A History of the World According to Cofee (New York: Soho Press, 2003); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 1997); Gordon Pitts, Te Codfathers: Lessons from the Maritime Business Elite (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2005); Larry Zuckerman, Te Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the World (New York: North Point Press, 1998); John Reader, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Arturo Warman, Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); James McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Amal Naj, Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits (New York: Knopf, 1992); John McPhee, Oranges (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975); Douglas Cazaux Sack- man, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Alissa Hamilton, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Dan Koeppel, Banana: Te Future of the Fruit that Changed the World (New York: Plume Publishing, 2007); James Wiley, Te Banana: Empire, Trade Wars, and Global- ization (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008); John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Gary Y. Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Hannah Volten, Milk: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); Charles Bamforth, Beer Is Proof that God Loves Us: Reaching Out to the Soul of Beer and Brewing (London: Pearson FT Press, 2010); Jennifer Matthews, Chicle: Te Chewing Gum of the Americas from the Ancient Maya to William Wrigley (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009); Cynthia Ott, Pumpkin: Te Curious History of an American Icon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); and Steve Penfold, Te Donut: A Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 30. For more detailed analysis, see Sterling Evans, “King Henequen: Order, Progress, and Ecological Change in Yucatán, 1850–1950,” in A Land Between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico, ed. Christopher R. Boyer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 150–72. 32 Agricultural History

31. Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: Te History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). For more on comparisons with the North American Free Trade Agree- ment, see Sterling Evans, “Nothing New about NAFTA: Te Economic Seamlessness of the U.S.-Mexican Border,” Journal of the West 47, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 73–86. 32. J. E. Spencer, “Te Abacá Plant and Its Fiber, Manila Hemp,” Economic Botany 7 ( July– Sept. 1953), 210–11. For abaca’s impact on its host country, see Norman G. Owen, Prosperity without Progress: Manila Hemp and Material Life in the Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 33. Standard works on the history of the galleon include William Lytle Shurz, Te Manila Galleon (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939); F. Van Wyck Mason, Te Manila Galleon (New York: Little Brown, 1961); Bernard Rees, Te Manila Galleon (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2003); Jason Schoonover, Te Manila Galleon (Raleigh, NC: Lulu Press, 2006); Robert Marx, In the Wake of the Galleons (North Palm Beach, FL: Best Publishing, 2001); Shirley Fish, Te Manila-Acapulco Galleons: Te Treasure Ships of the Pacifc (Central Milton Keynes, UK: AuthorHouse, 2011); and Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and James Sobredo, eds., European Entry into the Pacifc: Spain and the Acapulco-Manila Galleons (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001). For more on Chinese demand for silver, see Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, “Introduction,” in European Entry into the Pacifc, xxvii, xxxi; and Carlos Marichal, “Te Spanish-American Silver Peso: Export Commod- ity and Global Money of the Ancient Regime, 1550–1800,” in From Silver to Cocaine, 26–27. 34. Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo, “Introduction,” xxxiii. 35. Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 209; Elizabeth Potter Sievert, Te Story of Abaca: Manila Hemp’s Transformation from Textile to Marine Cordage to Specialty Paper (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009), 2. 36. H. T. Edwards, “Te Introduction of Abacá (Manila Hemp) into the Western Hemi- sphere,” Smithsonian Report (1945), 336, 346–47; Spencer, “Abacá Plant,” 202, 204; Karl Pelzer, “Te Philippine Abaca Industry,” Far Eastern Survey 17 (Mar. 24, 1948), 71, 73. 37. For further details, see Sievert, Te Story of Abaca. Economic and employment fgures are from Philippine Secretary of Agriculture Arthur Yap in “Foreword” to Sievert, Te Story of Abaca, xi. 38. For more, see Sterling Evans, “Te Force of Fiber: Re-Connecting the Philippines with Latin America and the American West via Transnational Environmental History,” in A Field on Fire: Essays on the Future of Environmental History, eds. Mark Hersey and Ted Steinberg (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming). 39. Outstanding studies in this developing feld include Matt Matsuda, Pacifc Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Nicholas Tomas, Islanders: Te Pacifc in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacifc Histories: Ocean, Land, People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacifc: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous Peoples from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); David Igler, Te Great Ocean: Pacifc Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Gregory Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacifc World: A Global Ecological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also J. R. McNeill, ed. Environ- mental History in the Pacifc World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2001). 40. Matsuda, Pacifc Worlds, 4, 2–3, 5–6. 41. Cecilia M. Tsu, Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture the Santa Clara Valley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Cushman, Guano and the Open- ing of the Pacifc World; Edward Dallam Melillo, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Ben Nobbs-Tiessen, Trends and Concerns for Agriculture into the Twenty-First Century 33

“Cultivating the State: Migrants, Citizenship, and the Transformation of the Bolivian Lowlands, 1952–2000,” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2016). For more on the Mennonite migration across the Americas, see Royden Loewen, Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and Mid-Twentieth-Century Rural Disjuncture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); and Loewen, Village among Nations: “Canadian” Mennonites in a Transnational World, 1916–2006 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 42. Peter A. Kopp, Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Okie, Te Georgia Peach, 7. 43. Benny J. Andrés, Jr., Power and Control in the Imperial Valley: Nature, Agribusiness, and Workers in the California Borderland, 1900–1940 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015); Timothy Paul Bowman, Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016); Sterling Evans, ed., Farming across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017); Nick Johnson, Grass Roots: A History of Cannabis in the American West (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017). For diferent angles on cannabis production, see Isaac Campos, Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Emily Dufton, Grass Roots: Te Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (New York: Basic Books, 2017). 44. Steve Shrifer, Chicken: Te Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Perla Guerrero, Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). 45. See, for example, Rocio Gomez, “Braceros in the Arkansas Delta, 1943–1964,” Te Ozark Historical Review 39 (Spring 2010): 1–18; Jeannie Whayne, Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Julie M. Weise, Corazón de Dixie: Migrant Mexicans in the U.S. South since 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); J. Justin Castro, “Mexican Braceros and Arkansas Cotton: Agri- cultural Labor and Civil Rights in the Post–World War II South,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 75, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 27–46; and William Chase Whittington, “Te Bracero Program in the Arkansas Delta: Te Power Held by Planter Elite,” (MA thesis, University of Arkansas, 2017). 46. A sampling of the important historical works on this include, Juan R. García, ed., Per- spectives in Mexican American Studies: Mexicans in the Midwest, vol. 2 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Juan R. García, Mexicans in the Midwest, 1900–1932 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); Andrew G. Wood, ed., Te Borderlands: An Encyclopedia of Culture and Politics on the U.S.-Mexican Divide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008); Kathleen Mapes, Sweet Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial Agriculture, and Imperial Politics (Urbana: University of Il- linois Press, 2009); Jim Norris, North for the Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009); Linda Allegro and Andrew Grant Wood, eds., Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland: Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Tisa Anders and Rosa Elia Cobos, “Te Betabeleras of Western Nebraska: Gender, Labor, and the Beet Sugar Industry,” in Farming across Borders, 285–308. Tere are also separate books on the history of Mexicans in Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. 47. Jim Hightower, “Coalitions of AgriCulture Outsiders Tackle Powerful AgriBiz Insiders,” Te Hightower Lowdown 19 (Nov. 2017): 2. 48. Eve E. Buckley, Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Cen- tury Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 49. Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 50. Jim Hightower, “State of the Plate, 2015: It’s Been an Eventful Year in the Populist Fight 34 Agricultural History for Healthy, Sustainable—and Tasty—Food for All,” Te Hightower Lowdown 17 (Nov. 2015): 1. 51. “Te Hidden Water We Use,” National Geographic, https://www.nationalgeographic. com/environment/freshwater/food/. 52. Hightower, “State of the Plate, 2015,” 1. 53. Berry, cited in ibid., 2. See also, Brandi Janssen, Making Local Food Work: Te Challenges and Opportunities of Today’s Small Farmer (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017); Teresa Opheim, ed., Te Future of Family Farms: Practical Farmers’ Legacy Letters Project (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016); and Steve Ventura and Martin Bailkey, eds., Good Food, Strong Communities: Promoting Social Justice through Local and Regional Food Systems (Iowa City: Uni- versity of Iowa Press, 2017). 54. Hightower, “2017 State of the Plate,” 2, 3; Eric Schlosser, “A Safer Food Future, Now,” Consumer Reports, May 2016, https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/safer-food-future- now/. 55. See Allan Savory with Jody Butterfeld, Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making (Washington: Island Press, 1999). 56. “Te Hidden Water We Use”; Ken Tudor, “Why Aren’t We Eating More Goat?,” Aug. 1, 2013, PetMD, https://www.petmd.com/blogs/thedailyvet/ktudor/2013/aug/why-arent- americans-eating-more-goat-30711. 57. Janet Larsen and J. Matthew Roney, “Farmed Fish Production Overtakes Beef,” EcoW- atch, http://www.ecowatch.com/farmed-fsh-production-overtakes-beef-1881760715.html. I thank Shane Hamilton for alerting me to this article. 58. Hightower, “State of the Plate, 2015,” 3–4. 59. Ibid., 2–3. 60. Hightower, “Te 2017 State of the Plate,” 4. 61. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Half of All US Food Produce Is Trown Away, New Research Suggests,” Te Guardian, July 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/13/ us-food-waste-ugly-fruit-vegetables-perfect, 1–2. 62. Murphy and Hansen-Kuhn, “Counting the Costs of Agricultural Dumping.” I thank Mike Little for drawing my attention to the issue of global agricultural dumping. 63. Anne Efand, “Small Farms, Cash Crops, Agrarian Ideals, and International Develop- ment,” Agricultural History 84, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 7. 64. For more on Mexico and the plight of NAFTA on farmers, see Timothy A. Wise, “Agricultural Dumping under NAFTA: Estimating the Costs of U.S. Agricultural Policies to Mexican Producers,” Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University Working Paper no. 09-08 (2010), http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/policy_research/AgNAFTA. html; and Evans, “Nothing New about NAFTA.” 65. “Te Developing World: A Dumping Ground for Irradiated Food,” Public Citizen, https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/fles/dumping_pdf.pdf; “Te History of Food Irradiation,” Public Citizen, https://www.citizen.org/history-food-irradiation. 66. Alexandra Zissu, “Te Buzz about Colony Collapse Disorder,” Natural Resources De- fense Council, Dec. 31, 2015, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/buzz-about-colony-collapse-disord er?gclid=Cj0KCQjw9ZDeBRD9ARIsAMbAmob1rr7f-RqLfrBAwCv5jlH50EOeZ6Ern8m_ Ke19vxLPh3ErIRGZMkYaAjPwEALw_wcB; EarthJustice,“Bees’ Toxic Problem,” https:// earthjustice.org/features/infographic-bees-toxic-problem. 67. EarthJustice, “Bees’ Toxic Problem.” 68. “USDA Provides $8 Million to Help Boost Declining Honey Bee Population,” Press Release no. 0130.14, https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2014/06/20/usda-provides- 8-million-help-boost-declining-honey-bee-population. 69. “Project Nourished,” http://www.projectnourished.com/.