The 4-H Harvest. Gabriel N. Rosenberg
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scales. Individuals must eat or perish. Communities risk hunger. Nations obtain food security. And the globe has a food system. Each of these statements registers a problem of governance and a logistical challenge for the maintenance of life at its variously conceived scales: individual, communal, national, and global. Governing programs identify bodies at each scale in need of sustenance and management. Food stamps and agricultural education treat consuming and producing bodies, respectively, while crop subsidy regimes target a food supply that gives vitality, in turn, to aggregated national and global populations. The production of food is arraigned as a crucial factor in projections of growth, and, similarly, projected growth shapes agricultural practices, sometimes cloaking the bucolic in a shroud of apocalyptic urgency. This procedure links the quotidian practices of individual farmers, like plowing and spraying fields, to the growth and sustenance of life in its various collective configurations. The biopolitics of agriculture exists not just within each scaled entity. It dwells in the interstices and in the labors through which those scales are constituted and coordinated. A biopolitical history of agriculture thus reveals a state anatomy in which the governance of agriculture “orchestrate[s] the conduct of the body biological, the body social, and the body politic,” to quote political theorist Wendy Brown’s description of biopolitics.17
Agricultural governance is never merely a question about how best to grow food and, thus, to produce life.18 It is also a constant calculation and negotiation of life’s value and what sorts of lives are worth living. At an intimate scale, agriculture coordinates between life and death through the obvious fact that some life—both the hog and the nubbin for its slop—is only produced to ultimately die. Farmers systematically extinguish other life, such as pests and weeds, to preserve fragile monocultures and the precarious ecosystem of industrial agriculture. The geopolitics of agriculture is just as inextricably wound into this dialectic of life and death. Driven by the demands of U.S. Cold War foreign policy objectives, the Food for Peace program and the subsequent Green Revolution moved millions of subsistence farmers throughout the global South into precarious cash cropping and urban wage labor, rendering them dependent on the importation of food stuffs. Escalating petroleum prices in the 1970s and the Soviet purchase of American crop surpluses, sealed by the sudden diplomatic urgency of détente, caused massive increases in food prices and generated deaths from famine and political instability.19 Similarly, for the last half-century, the production of food for consumption in the global North depended on the widespread use of toxic petrochemicals in the global South. That dynamic placed the cause of life’s attrition in the water, air, and soil of some communities so that other communities might consume what they liked.20
The historical trajectories of 4-H, agribusinesses, and the reproduction of the American state illustrate precisely how agriculture is biopolitical and, in doing so, identify neglected biopolitical valences to state power and capitalist agriculture that I call “agrarian futurism.” Historians have cataloged the influence of agrarian ideas, language, and politics in the American past but have tended to characterize agrarians as antimodernists—individuals on the margins of American political culture dedicated to protecting a vanishing agricultural past from an encroaching urban, industrial future. By contrast, American agricultural expansion often produced agrarianism that was radically modernist and futurist in its orientation and that enjoyed powerful influence in centers of government well into the twentieth century. I define agrarian futurism as an ideology linking the governance of human social and biological reproduction to the practice, theory, and language of agriculture. It is agrarian in the sense that it privileges tropes, technologies, and knowledge derived from plant and animal agriculture. It is futurist in the sense that it links the intensive governance of the present in an aspirational vision of the future. To understand the powerful influence that agrarian futurism holds in American political culture—conditioning debates on topics as diverse as development programs, reproductive rights, farm policy, and estates taxes—this book locates it in the powerful fusion of agricultural expertise and modernist ambitions in the modern American state.
Agrarian futurism is conceptually, rhetorically, and materially invested in the concept of generation as an instrument of biopolitical development. The context of nineteenth-century “improved” agricultural practice acutely informed how agrarian futurists sought to manage human reproduction. Beyond the gaze of the husbandry expert, human reproduction often seemed ill timed, like a field gone to seed or planted too late in the season. In nineteenth-century agriculture, the synchronization of reproduction brought uniform plants and animals, as well as paths to enhanced future prosperity. Like most farmers throughout history, nineteenth-century farmers manipulated nonhuman reproduction according to seasonal rhythms that created discrete generations of plants and animals. A hog farmer had the sows farrow at the same time so that their offspring would be of uniform size for market. The ability to organize reproduction also enabled farmers to selectively breed and, thus, to transform animal and plant bodies for human economic purposes over ensuing generations and time scales that exceeded the span of a single human life. In both cases, generational differences—differences between parents and offspring—offered a way for farmers to coordinate between banal present tasks and future bounties, especially when the agricultural present was often impoverished.
A futurist orientation, of course, eased some of the contradictions between America’s mythological origin among independent Jeffersonian homesteaders and the material reality of the United States as a settler-colonial project. Westward expansion and settlement of North America required one of the most successful projects of planned land reform in human history: the calculated dispossession of indigenous populations, redistribution of land to European populations practicing settled agriculture, and, finally, integration of settled agriculture into Atlantic trade networks. Contrary to the rhetoric of individualistic independence and self-sufficiency, this project necessitated that rural spaces be laboratories of effective governance. The largely rural West, to quote historian Richard White, was “the Kindergarten of the American state.”21 Modernist political projects ran directly through American hinterlands: innovative state-building programs, communication networks, public health initiatives, and regulatory mechanisms all emerged out of efforts to govern peripheral agricultural spaces.22 In the twentieth century, rural America served as a vital staging ground for international development programs, neoliberal economics, and the transition to the post-Fordist service economy.23 In all these cases, the guiding conflict was rarely between urban visions of change and a bitter and unified rural resistance. Rather, conflicts often pitted rural economic and racial classes against one another and designated some rural people as important components of governing coalitions. Indeed, many agrarian movements were modernist and utterly enamored of the ability of collective institutions to unleash powerful economic and political change.24 Farm folk, despite the homespun rhetoric, have possessed expansive political imaginations. Their work and their lives crystallize agrarian futurism.
Tasked with improving the impoverished spaces of America’s sprawling agrarian empire, USDA experts turned to these generational logics for animals, plants, and humans alike. These technocrats placed the improvement of seemingly marginal locales and bodies at the core of the nation’s reproductive future. Although these technocrats diverged in fundamental ways from the agrarian modernists of the populist rebellion, they shared populism’s confidence that the nation’s future hinged on the transformation and budding prosperity of nonmetropolitan spaces. This inverted the typical narrative of urban modernity in which movement into the future coincided always with movement to the city.
To map 4-H as a biopolitical apparatus makes this book a work of queer political history, a declaration that may seem initially counterintuitive, given that it makes no direct comment on the histories of sexual minorities.25 The history of 4-H challenges depictions of nonmetropolitan family life as more authentic or normal than its metropolitan counterparts. Instead, I embed the material production of youthful bodies and the reproduction of rural society squarely within the historical development of state power and capitalist agriculture in rural America. The nucleated family farm was the cultural effect of the managed industrialization of the American countryside. This site of healthy social and biological reproduction in the countryside was ever fragile, faltering, and in need of federal assistance. Such an explanation makes normalized relationships between rural people and the American state rural heterosexuality’s prerequisite.
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