History of the Future: Farming and Vertical Integration, 1940

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  The small, independent farms had been replaced by global conglomerates who are centralizing food production, controlling the distribution of fertilizer and seeds, causing massive soil erosion, destroying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.