JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 745  Blog Bookstore

This 1940 pamphlet, published by the Texas State Research
Foundation, is a relatively young, paleo-futuristic view of the coming of the
vertically integrated food production business in the United States .
Its title (Building an Agricultural and Industrial Empire through Research)
directly relates the idea of a grand agricultural/industrial alliance, with the
contents pointing the way to far more than simple “research”, as the cover
intimates.  There is a giant series of
silos, and even a barn (in the top right corner), but the image

here is pure smokestack-encrusted
agribusiness.  The simple farmer on his
tractor makes his slow way through his high-bound and gross techno skyline—of course
the visual message implies that the family farm would be aided by “research”,
but it also opens the door wide into the future to what the American farm would
become.  The family farm would be
absorbed by the skyline of major business: 
at the time when this pamphlet was published some 22% of the American population
was directly involved in farming; by 2002 that figure had genocidally dropped
to about 1.5%.  The small, independent farms
had been replaced by global conglomerates who are centralizing food production,
controlling the distribution of fertilizer and seeds, causing massive soil
erosion, destroying aquifers, depleting the soil, polluting with toxic
chemicals, and on and on.

 So the image of this puffy pamphlet’s cover turns out to be
prescient after all, and pretty much true: 
except for the farmer-on-the-tractor part, as that guy got pretty much
absorbed into a corporate Farmer Entity.