Rural America Part 3: Development of American Agriculture Up to World War II

In the previous post in this series I presented two models of a farm economy that were widely deployed in the British colonies of North America. In this post we will go over how government action affected the use of both models from the first decades of our country’s independence until the New Deal era just prior to World War II. This review will provide us with some understanding of the problems faced by earlier generations of farmers. That background will make it easier to understand how the American agricultural economy has become a plaything of the wealthy in more recent times.

After our country gained independence, restrictions on expansion westward imposed by the British government were removed. Again, I won’t dwell on the shameful history of our treatment of native Americans. Our focus here is on how government policies shaped which model of rural economy dominated as the country expanded. For more details on the changes in farm policy I will summarizing here, check out this document.

At first, federal policy favored selling newly-seized federal lands in the west to private parties at high prices. Southern politicians favored one goal of this policy, namely the spread of the plantation model. And, in fact, in the south the plantation model continued to expand westward. Wealthy planters could afford to buy large tracts of land. It was cheaper for them to move their plantations westward than to try replenishing the soils they had exhausted by repeatedly planting the same one or two crops they had been growing on their existing plots. The invention of the cotton gin opened a new market for cotton, which happened to grow wonderfully across large sections of the south. This also encouraged the spread of the plantation model, since the intense labor needed to harvest cotton could be obtained cheaply by using slaves.

Over the course of the early 19th century federal policy was repeatedly modified to promote the spread of the yeoman farmer model. Finally, the Homestead Act of 1864, passed during the Civil War when the southern states were not actively involved in US federal policy, settled the issue decisively in favor of the yeoman farm model for newly-settled lands in the mid-western and western US. As a result, by the end of the 19th century the vast majority of agriculture in America was carried out by small farmers. It should be pointed out that this act, and a couple of follow-up acts in the decade of the 1900s led to many new farms in the great plains, many new farmers, and the loss of huge tracts of native prairie land to agriculture. This led to some unforeseen consequences in later decades.

The American economy as a whole was transformed by the Civil War. Manufacturing, finance, and transportation industries exploded in size and economic power. As one might expect from our discussion of the unique vulnerabilities of rural communities, small farms were targeted for exploitation by some of these large businesses. For example, the railroad and riverboat barons raised shipping fees to the point that farmers found it difficult to afford shipping their products to market via rail or boat. Farm communities pressured their federal representatives to give them relief from these monopolies. This is one reason the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was passed by Congress.

It would be a mistake to think that these major changer eliminated the plantation model altogether. Instead, via a series of maneuvers powerful landowners in the former Confederate states were able to re-establish the plantation model. First, they were able to break down the Reconstruction Era promise made to former slave owners that they would be able to establish small farms of their own. The famous “40 acres and a mule” policy was weakened and ignored to the extent that the majority of former slaves and their descendants who worked in agriculture in the southern states were either tenant farmers or farm laborers on land rented from the great plantation owners or their descendants.

Family farms did relatively well in the first two decades of the 20th century. As mentioned above, both the number of family farms and the average income of farm owners increased during these two decades. At first this was a result of several factors. Both federal and state government designed policies to protect farmers from exploitation by monopolists, ease their ability to obtain loans, and obtain information on improved farming and marketing techniques. The rise of farm cooperatives and organizations helped farmers pool their power and obtain better prices for their products. Organizations such as the Grange had been lobbying for the interests of family farmers to governments at all levels since its founding after the Civil War and the collective result of these efforts was also bearing fruit (sorry for the pun!) at this time.

When World War I broke out in 1914 European farm output dropped. Many American farmers, who were already doing relatively well, responded by quickly increasing production. During the war years American farmers prospered. The war ended in 1918, and by 1920 European agriculture was well on the way to recovery from the devastation of the war. As their production went up, the need for imports from America declined. American farmers who had rushed to increase production could not find another market for much of the crop they had produced. As a result, the price of agricultural products dropped. Farmers who had taken out loans to pay for lands they had bought to grow more crops or to buy seed and equipment were no longer able to make enough money to keep up with loan payments.

The federal government made some attempts to address farmers’ concerns in the 1920s but they didn’t lead to significant improvements for most farmers. Then twin disasters struck between 1929 and 1935. The Great Depression caused prices for agricultural products to drop precipitously, leaving many more farmers unable to make loan payments. Many farmers responded at first by trying to increase yields, but that just pushed prices down even further. Starting in 1931 a multi-year drought struck the mid-west. Crops failed. Many of the newer farm families were relatively inexperienced with drought conditions and had not developed strategies to deal with them. As a result, millions of acres of land were left bare. High winds carried off topsoil in dust storms. With their farms ruined, many farm families had little choice but to abandon their homes and move. All told, about 2.5 million people migrated out of the great plains states due to economic hardship during the 1930s.

The New Deal program initiated by the FDR administration included several measures addressing agricultural issues specifically. These measures altered the economics of farming fundamentally and laid the legal parameters for the recovery of American agriculture that took place starting in the 1940s.

The primary piece of legislation included in FDR’s New Deal for agriculture was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. This law, with some follow-up legislation in 1934 and 1935, set up a subsidy system for production of major agricultural commodities: wheat, corn (maize), hogs, cotton, tobacco, rice, milk, rye, flax, barley, grain sorghum, cattle, peanuts, sugar beets, sugar cane, and potatoes. Farmers were encouraged to work with the newly-formed federal agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, to arrive at a level of production that would enable the farmer to receive a price for their produce as close as possible to the target price fixed by the law. The law specified that the target price would be the price for the produce in the years 1910-1914, when prices for farm products were high enough for most farmers to do well financially. If the farmer was forced to sell her produce below the target price the federal government paid the farmer a subsidy to bring her total receipts up to what they would have been if she had been paid the target price.

This law stabilized agricultural markets and saved many farmers from going bankrupt and many farms from foreclosure. The law was drafted largely based on the yeoman farm model, where the owner of the farm was also the person working the land. The federal agency worked directly with landowners, not farm laborers or tenant farmers. In a sharecropping situation, the federal government reimbursed the landowner if the price of the produce sold by tenant farmers using that land did not meet the target price. The law included provisions to ensure that for any subsidies awarded to landowners, appropriate percentages would be shared with tenant farmers or laborers who had worked the land. Southern lawmakers were able to weaken the subsidy sharing provisions and some agency employees overseeing the program in southern states purposely failed to enforce the provisions. As a result, tenant farmers in the south were largely driven out of business in the following decades.

The Supreme Court overthrew the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1936 but the FDR administration was able to pass modified legislation tin 1938 hat passed muster with the Supreme Court and continued the subsidies. Congress also included in this legislation provisions to help mid-west farmers recover from the dust bowl devastation and change farming practices to protect and preserve topsoil.

The sum total of the changes brought about by the New Deal brought many American farmers teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and desperation into relative prosperity. In other cases, e.g. the “Okies” who migrated from the midwest to California to escape the Dust Bowl or the southern tenant farmers we mentioned above, the New Deal programs were not enough to save them from impoverishment. As a whole, however, the use of the plantation model was greatly reduced. Most farms remained of moderate size and operated on the yeoman model.

After World War II this situation changed drastically. What happened to the farm economy then and what it did to rural communities will be the topic of our next post.

If not Facebook, What? Part 1

This is the third post in a series. Since it has been months since the last post you can review the previous posts here and here.

Is it possible to have a Facebook-like experience on the internet for free without becoming the raw material for a massive data-gathering and analysis operation and then becoming the ignorant target of manipulation by entities using the results of that operation? In short, no. There is no economic model that would enable a site trying to implement Facebook’s user experience — minus the manipulation — while offering the service for free.

There is a movement afoot to force the hands of large corporations that provide web-based internet services so that they can no longer collect behavioral data from users without their knowledge. In 2018 California enacted a law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, that gives consumers the right to obtain from internet service providers any personal information the provider has collected about them, including inferences made about the consumer derived from analysis, opt out of having that data collected or sold to third parties, or have any or all of the existing data deleted. That law technically went into effect on New Year’s Day, but California is still working on the regulatory framework.

This law is likely to have a significant impact on the business models employed by most of the large companies that provide internet services. First, even though it is only a state law, many popular websites are likely to change their privacy policies nationwide and perhaps globally so they don’t have to customize the site’s code based on the legal residence of the connecting user. Second, revealing the results of their proprietary analysis algorithms to consumers will at least partially undercut the competetive advantages enjoyed by Google and Facebook, for exampe, in the war to develop the most accurate predictions about future consumer behavior. This will likely force the companies to modify their business model. It may even topple them from their dominant place in the field. Many other companies that specialize in consumer behavior analysis or the (re)sale of this proprietary data could take major financial hits as well.

Needless to say, the companies affected by this legislation will not take the change lying down. Furthermore, as more states adopt similar laws congress will face increasing pressure to preempt them with a federal law that will standardize data privacy rights so that internet service providers aren’t swamped trying to comply with several different requirements. Don’t expect a federal law with any teeth to pass in the current political environment, however. There may be hope for something substantial in 2021, depending on the outcome of this year’s election, so if you are concerned about data privacy and aren’t already motivated to get to the polls this year, find out the positions of potential candidates for the house, senate and president and vote accordingly.

In any event, unless you happen to live in California, you may not be able to manage data collected about you any better this coming year than in the past, depending on what internet services you use. Some consultants are already telling internet service provider companies not to guarantee any enhanced data privacy protections to users who are not residents of California. Otherwise, they are likely to face unnecessary lawsuits for violation of the terms of service from people who live outside of California. That doesn’t mean they customize their site code; it just means that their terms of service specify the enhanced privacy protections only apply to residents of California and if you try to use those protections they will ignore your requests.

Absent the type of legal changes that would force major internet service providers into a different economic model that did not depend on exploiting our online behavior to make it easier for others to manipulate us, how can you protect yourself from Facebook, Google, etc? The most effective method is to stop using their platforms, and the rest of this series will provide you with several ways to do just that.

Since this series focuses on Facebook’s abuses, I will concentrate on ways to replace the Facebook experience. What to do about Google, Twitter, Bing, Youtube, etc. will have to wait. First, I assume you still want to have some kind of presence online. Is there any way to replicate the features of Facebook you like while avoiding the drawbacks? People’s reasons for being on Facebook differ, of course, and alternatives may meet some people’s needs and not others. In general though the short answer is “Not easily.”

For that reason I intend to present a staged series of alternatives, starting in this post with those that involve the least effort and most closely resemble Facebook. The closest Facebook competitors I can find that offer the type of privacy and absence of behind-your-back personal data manipulation practiced by Facebook are Diaspora pods, MeWe, Minds, and Sociall.io, arranged in alphbetical order. The major drawback to these alternative platforms is that none of your Facebook friends probably has an account on any of them. Since these are social networking sites, no account means no privileged access, means even if you get your friends to your page on one of these alternate platforms, they won’t be able to see it unless you make it available to the general public. Of course you are already limiting who gets to see what you post on Facebook, right? Right … ? (Face palm!) How about if we wait while you take care of that ….

All good now? Let’s say you create an account on one of these platforms and just as on Facebook you create rules to limit access to your posts. The only way your Facebook friends will get to see your posts is if they create an account and you let that account into one of your privileged access groups, whether it’s called “friend,” “contact,” etc. Now you have to convince your Facebook friends to create and use that account. They don’t have to move their Facebook presence onto the other platform, but they do have to maintain that account and log in to it to see your posts. As long as your friends maintain their pages on Facebook you will all have to split time between the two platforms. Some people won’t stand for the inconvenience, friend or not.

Moving to an alternate social networking platform would work best if an entire group of people who wanted to keep in touch did it together, or if you, as the group leader/inspiration/provocateur, convinced the bulk of the group to migrate over. And the move is not just a matter of following the leader’s pages but each member of the group moving their Facebook presence to the other platform. That way the entire group can abandon Facebook, at least as a means for interacting with the other members of the group.

Still considering this option? Here’s a quick, beginner-level review of the platforms mentioned above. Diaspora is not really a social networking platform. It’s a software suite used to create social networking “pods.” A “pod” is a group of people who share some common interest or connection that motivates them to form an online group so they can share information with each other. Members of the “pod” can communicate with one another online because someone with technical skill has installed the Diaspora software and used it to create a social networking platform on one or more physical or virtual computers accessible to members of the “pod”. There are many, many existing Diaspora “pods.” Whether you and your Facebook friends would find any of them to be a suitable online home is anyone’s guess. If not, you would need to create a new “pod,” and there is the major drawback; you need someone with technical skill to create and maintain the “pod.” No, I won’t do it for you, unless you and your Friends all commit to pay for it. If you don’t want to investigate costs yourself, wait for some of the following posts, where I will address costs.

MeWe is purpose-built as a Facebook replacement platform. Its major selling point is that it intentionally eschews doing anything with data about you except using it to improve its own services. No sales of your behavioral data to third parties, no behind-your-back research on what makes you tick, no targeted advertising. The site has been around for about 3 years and is attracting more users, but it is still dwarfed by Facebook, and many of the new users of the site were kicked off Facebook for promoting racism, violence, conspiracy theories, or terrorism. Fortunately, you can quite easily isolate yourself from their absurdities. MeWe doesn’t push unrequested material into your feeds and doesn’t run algorithms against the information for which you do request access to proactively feed you other information their “algorithms” say you might be interested in. (I put “algorithms” in quotes because many of us suspect we get selected to receive some of the posts showing up in our Facebook news feeds because someone paid Facebook big bucks, not because Facebook’s algorithms actually singled us out as interested parties.)

Minds and Sociall.io are also meant to be Facebook replacements, but with a twist. Both of these social networking platforms use a technology called “blockchain.” In Sociall.io’s case, the “blockchain” technology is used to eliminate the need for a centralized server/server farm to host the platform. Instead, the entire social network community’s activities are processed distributively by all the computers of the members. This is no place to go into the details of how “blockchain” works, except to voice one fundamental objection to the entire project. The computers participating in a blockchain consume massive amounts of energy due to the cryptographic demands of the technology. The amount of energy consumed grows exponentially as the blockchain increases in size. All that computing power would be put to better use trying to solve more critical problems.

Minds uses blockchain for the limited purpose of generating crypto-currency. Why? The founders of Minds wanted to develop a business model that rewards users. As I pointed out in my earlier post, Facebook extracts valuable information from your online behavior and sells it, but gives you no cut. Minds also gets value from your online behavior, but they pay you for it. That’s where the crypto-currency comes in. Rather than sending you a check in the mail, they deposit crypto-currency in your online account and let you use that crypto-currency to “buy” advanced features or exclusive content. They are working on integrating their crypto-currency with other existing crypto-currencies, such as Bitcoin. Someday the crypto-currency from Minds may be convertible to dollars. This positive feature of the Minds platform is offset by the fact that crypto-currencies are a form of “blockchain” and are subject to the same criticism regarding wasteful energy use. My advice? Don’t go there.

If none of these options appeal to you, wait for my following posts where I offer more alternatives.