Why America Doesn’t Grow Its Own Food

This system is no accident. It has deep historical roots going back to the advent of the railroads in the 19th century.

A common version of the history of Iowa farming is that immigrants from foreign lands or the East Coast increasingly moved to the state as the railroads were established. Those who arrived established small farms that one family could work. Over time, the more efficient, successful ones became larger by buying the land of their less efficient failed neighbors until we were left with very few, very large farms. This is the myth. The reason farms got bigger is that various policies made it so.

First came the massive subsidies for the firms that took on the colossal task of building railroads across the entire North American continent in the mid-1800s. These railroads provided the pipeline to move agricultural products to the East where the markets were, which established the basic colonial relationship.

Interestingly, the latest adaptation of Little House on the Prairie, based on the novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder, now running on Netflix, tackles this issue head-on. In the seventh episode of Season 1, the protagonist, Charles Ingalls, confronts the railway man Eli James, who admits the railroad posted signs advertising “free land” to lure families like the Ingalls to settle in Kansas. The railroad industry wanted to move settlers to land occupied by the Osage Nation to displace the Osage people and lay the groundwork for the railroad and the agricultural industry that would ensue. 

All of that infrastructure ensured the establishment of an agricultural industry, as opposed to Jefferson’s ideal of yeoman farmers that he hoped would be the backbone of a democratic America. That vision was never realized. It is that industry we face today. It includes the Farm Bureau, land-grant schools like Iowa State University, commodity groups, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which were all established and shaped by a powerful agricultural industry lobby.

The infrastructure came first as a matter of policy, and agriculture developed within that shell, so that its direction was pre-determined. This was not simply an evolutionary process. All of those interlocking parts are now securely in place and determine legislative policies and the fate of our land and food system.

This is why policymakers do not ask: “How can America feed itself?” Instead, their questions are based much more on the interests of global industry and trade. Therefore, so are the answers.

If the question is how to more efficiently produce more raw materials for the swine, ethanol, and junk food industries, the seed, chemical and implement companies develop answers year to year and farmers do those things. They don’t decide to do anything. They follow industry standards.

One of the people who avidly read all the reports that came out of Ames in the 1920s and 1930s was Joseph Stalin in the newly formed Soviet Union. He was so persuaded on how industrialized farming could remove the individual farmer that he invited some aggies from Iowa State University to the Soviet Union to help him establish his factories in the field. They went and they tried.

It didn’t work out so well for the communists there, but it did pretty well for the capitalists here.

E. Paul DurrenbergerMore by this author →

E. Paul Durrenberger is a retired anthropologist and the author of more than 30 books. In The Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa, (University Press of Colorado, 2021) he documents the processes and policies by which an infrastructure was built within which today’s agriculture would develop.