How the U.S. Enlisted Farmers to ‘Feed the World’ in the 20th Century

It was also a time when the federal government took a more active role in rural communities. Simons explores how the Lend-Lease Act of 1941—which enabled the U.S. to supply Great Britain, the Soviet Union and other allies with tanks, airplanes, ships and weapons before formally entering World War II—also set the stage for larger-scale food processing after the war.

Such changes had wide-reaching effects on the nation’s economy. Meanwhile, technological developments in mass communication as well as letters from relatives fighting overseas broadened horizons at home. Farm journalists, seed companies and advertisers all jockeyed for attention, sales and higher yields in the effort to shape how farmers viewed themselves and the world around them.

In the global power vacuum after World War II, farmers demanded a reluctant government act to prevent postwar starvation. Conservative Cold Warriors in the Truman administration slowly recognized that addressing global needs could help improve both U.S. national security interests and global opinion. A Cold War consensus to “feed the world” emerged as farmers were enlisted to demonstrate the values of American exceptionalism through their commodity exports. Simons shows that episodes of “cornfield diplomacy”—from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev puttering around Roswell Garst’s farm in Coon Rapids, Iowa in 1959, to Xi Jinping’s Iowa tour in 2012—are built on much longer traditions of international and multicultural agricultural exchange in the Midwest.

Simons grew up in the Michigan Fruit Belt and teaches environmental history at Hamilton College. Barn Raiser spoke with him about Midwestern agriculture’s role in pivotal moments just before and after World War II.

What first got you interested in the history of Midwestern farmers and their relationship to the wider world?

Most historians would agree that there’s always a little bit of an autobiography in whatever they study. I think the earliest seed for what became the book was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. I became curious with this population of farmers that I grew up among. Superficially, they seemed guarded against incursions from the outside world, yet they were enthusiastic to support this overseas military operation that they only had a tenuous connection to.

One of the first political figures I dug into was Arthur Vandenberg, who was a Republican senator from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and ran the Grand Rapids Herald. He represents the crux of this period when the United States turned away from what people refer to as “isolationism” toward Cold War interventionism through U.S. participation in the United Nations and NATO. I saw agriculture and farm policy as a way to understand how rural people at the time understood their role in the wider world.

Global Heartland charts this period when Americans in and around agriculture—farmers, farm interest groups like the Farm Bureau and Farmers Union, commodity trade groups and the USDA—are debating about whether to focus on domestic or international markets for their products. What was the nature of that debate?

In the Midwest, if you’re raising cows to produce milk, your market is Chicago, or in some cases in New York, because of the biological limit and realities of how long food stays fresh. That’s also true if you’re a fruit producer in Michigan or in any number of other markets. 

The depression that follows World War I is important. Farmers effectively face a double depression that starts in the 1920s, and then gets worse in the 1930s. The argument throughout that time is that the global market is just too volatile. In the 1930s, Henry Wallace, then Secretary of Agriculture under Roosevelt, takes more of a free trade approach, while George Peek, the first administrator of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, wants to close off and focus on domestic economies. In 1940 and 1941, when sales are increasing and it looks like farmers may be pulling out of the depression, farm organizations and the USDA are saying, “Don’t get excited. Just stick to home.” The people running these agencies and organizations are advising farmers to keep their eyes on their own fields and not look abroad.

It’s only when the vast scope of the war becomes clear, and the fact that the state is stepping in to guarantee farm profits, that farmers see an opportunity for trade overseas. After the war, humanitarianism is involved in the argument to stave off a famine in Europe, but there’s clearly a desire to prolong these markets, to help generate those into the future.

A new vision of the economy emerges, but World War II also accelerates technologies that make dairy products something that can be sent around the world. Dehydrated milk, for example, had existed before, but not on the large scale that was made possible by, for example, the federal government funding the construction of factories for Kraft because their products were needed for Lend-Lease.

But you can’t just have changes in technology or the market. You also need people to reconceptualize a sense of national responsibility, or Christian responsibility, to the rest of the world. I see it as this complication sparked by World War II that ultimately creates the postwar world and reshapes the agricultural economy.

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A tin of “National Household” powdered milk, associated with the British home front during the Second World War.

Imperial War Museums EPH 1317

A tin of “National Household” powdered milk, associated with the British home front during the Second World War.

Imperial War Museums EPH 1317

The Lend Lease Act of 1941, championed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, allowed the United States to “lend” rather than sell arms and supplies to its allies. Lend-Lease often gets represented by factory assembly lines for building tanks, airplanes and ships to send overseas, but you argue that it was a big deal for farmers and changed the landscape of U.S. agriculture and agricultural industrial policy.

The key to Lend-Lease is the fact that the farmers didn’t have a choice.

The federal government was buying these goods on the market, and farmers were locked into it. Some people saw Lend-Lease as tantamount to a declaration of war, which I think you could argue it was. Farmers are forced into it, but they are suddenly more financially stable. At the same time, it sets the pattern for increasing farm size and a dwindling number of farmers.

American food is given a new, tangible quality. American GIs in England, for example, see eggs stamped with the name of their local co-op. This distinguishes farmers from the factory worker who’s making a bomber that’s going overseas. As a laborer on the line, you have some ownership of that thing that you’re doing, but on the farm, it’s a more direct connection: you own your farm, you’re making the choices, you have a little more agency and you’re selling it to the middleman who is moving it up the market for you.

Farmers don’t identify as laborers, although fundamentally they are laborers. They see themselves as businessman and owners, but ultimately they’re at the whims of the market and what the U.S. government is doing to intervene in it.

Most scholars treat the 1940s as a breaking point. You’ll either read books about American agriculture up to the 1940s, or books will start at the 1950s and afterward, but understanding this transition moment is critical. It is where it becomes a modern agricultural system that then leads the farm crisis of the 1980s and beyond.

You write about the international workers who came to work on U.S. farms during World War II. How did these migrant farm workers lay the groundwork for the agricultural system we have today?

I collapse all of these labor patterns into one chapter, but they are distinct. In the 1920s, a limited number of Mexican farmworkers traveled beyond the borderlands to work on sugar beet farms in Colorado, Nebraska and Minnesota. During World War II, those networks become more formalized. The federal government sent trains down to Mexico City and, using the USDA and Department of Labor, got as many people as they could to work on farms.

Another example is “reverse Lend-Lease,” through which the Allies “pay back” the United States. The year 1943 sees Britain sending Black imperial subjects from the Caribbean to U.S. farmers, which bears a grim resemblance to chattel slavery. 

Britain looks overseas for most of its food. It needs its colonies to produce the food that it then sends back home. The United States stands this on its head. The United States can produce all the food it wants, but it needs people to sell that food to. And it also needs the workers to grow that food.

It’s fascinating the way predominantly white farmers came to understand these non-white people who were coming to work for them. They’re overwhelmingly positive because they’re obviously saving these farmers by doing that. But there’s also this interesting case where American dairy farmers want white Bahamians to come and work on their farms; there’s this entrenched racial knowledge that a non-white worker can work in a field, can pick beans or whatever, but they don’t have the innate knowledge to work with livestock. You needed a white Bahamian to do that, so the thinking goes.

That episode is a looking glass that distinguishes attitudes that otherwise get clouded by generally progressive sounding support for international cooperation. A lot of these migrant workers are bouncing from farm to farm because they’re finding the conditions so deplorable.

With the bigger operators, the workers often lived in unused livestock quarters or livestock quarters at fairgrounds. The Chicago Defender did a good job of reporting on the conditions that these farmworkers faced. The workers can’t leave. They can’t run away, or they’ll be arrested. This program [reverse Lend-Lease] ends with the war.

Ultimately, it is the Bracero program that formalizes predominantly Mexican immigrant work in American farm fields. That establishes a pattern for the way that agriculture works in the United States. It is a system that lasts—I always want to say, “until today,” but I need to step back from “today”—that lasts until early 2025. 

Many folks have this vision of the federal government leading European relief efforts like the Marshall Plan and Berlin Airlift after World War II, but initially, the Truman administration took a hands-off approach on the question of sending food overseas. What changed the Truman administration’s mind?

Returning to this idea of isolationism, the government was more isolationist than the American public and, in particular, farmers. It was the farmers themselves that needed to push the other way.

It’s interesting to find members of Congress from, say, Minnesota, who in 1947 are adamantly opposed to sending grain overseas, either as aid or in some cases through sales. Then by 1948, they’re lauding the Marshall Plan.

It’s farmers and farm organizations who ultimately push those lawmakers there. For one farm organization, the Farmers Union—which today is a liberal antidote to the much more conservative Farm Bureau—this is their last hurrah. They have a lot of strength during the New Deal. They’re friendly with Henry Wallace and they have a much more cooperative vision of engagement with the rest of the world. But their vision gets co-opted. It gets rolled into a Cold War vision, and then there’s some internal strife within the organization. They’re ultimately supportive of the Korean War and they fall in line—they have to—if they want to stay in existence during the Cold War.

Corn and soybeans are what we think of as the dominant Midwest row crops in the global economy today. I found it interesting that soybean growing only takes off in the Midwest during this period thanks to Lend-Lease.

Part of the reason soybeans get grown is because the supply of seed oils disappears, and so, in addition to being feed for livestock, they provide oils that find their way into paint and all these different non-edible materials. It creates this fascinating connection that continues to today where the United States is growing soybeans for China.

Very soon after World War II, the United States is outproducing China in soybeans. In that early period, it’s still mostly for human consumption, it’s not going for livestock consumption like it is today.

The USDA’s county agents are the avenue for this. They’re out in the field and telling farmers, “You can make a lot of money if you’re interested in growing this particular thing.” They would take them to see some demonstration plots.  

The county agent comes into being alongside the Farm Bureau, which was founded in 1919. County agents are not employees at the Farm Bureau, but there is an intimate connection between the two. The agent, who has ties to the local community, becomes the avenue for the federal government to have a much closer relationship with rural America.

As you point out, farmers seem to be the vanguard of internationalism after the war. But right up to America’s entry into the war, the Midwest is associated with America First and isolationism. What do you make of this divergence? Is this something to do with elite opinion?

I think this is a pretty good observation. Take someone like Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh absolutely would have been a Trump supporter today because of his racialized understanding of what “made America great” and his admiration of Germany. Lindbergh in a way is kind of like the Elon Musk of the 1930s and 1940s.

When we talk about isolationism, people generally just look at voting patterns. Voting is too simplified and it doesn’t map onto the much more complicated calculus people make when they think about the rest of the world. When you look at the upper Midwest, there’s a sense of being part of a global community. A lot of people still have relatives overseas. You can’t be isolationist when you have all these connections and you’re still having Swedish language church services.

Would you talk about this aviation-driven utopian agrarian internationalist vision, espoused by Vice President Henry Wallace, and why it was never fully realized?

“Air-mindedness” is this semi-utopian thing that comes out of World War II driven by the ubiquity of airplane technology and by the experience of sending millions of people across the country and around the globe. There is this sense of a world in motion.

There’s a bit of naïve hopefulness among farmers in the 1940s and 1950s—this idea that every farmer is going to cordon off a bit of their fields and that’s where they’ll put their airplane. It follows from how agriculture production is getting so technologically intensified in the 1940s, in part because of the need for efficiency: people are moving off of farms, and you don’t have the farm hands you used to have.

Aviation creates this sense of a greater connection to the world at large and is seen as a way to make rural agricultural life less benighted, making farmers into cosmopolitans. You find all these stories about people flying to Chicago for dinner from Wisconsin or wherever, and then they just fly back to their farm. No longer do you feel like you’re trapped on the farm.

Historians write about this sense of connection in the 1920s that the radio provides. Aviation augments it. But what kills this push toward cosmopolitanism is the same intensification of capital and technology that drove those changes in the first place. It’s what has made farms get bigger and bigger but also pushed many out of farming. And so while there’s still an organization called the International Flying Farmers today, from the beginning the group was dominated by well-to-do livestock farmers.

People really believed, like Henry Wallace, that aviation was something that could connect the world —it would democratize the economy, it would democratize governments around the world, it would create connections across the ocean. But ultimately, it remained the province of the well-to-do.

Would you talk a little bit about where the idea of “feeding the world” began and how it fit all these different elements together and pulled so many people in? 

Farmers are being told by the USDA that they need to limit production in the 1930s because they’re flooding the market, and then there’s a sudden reverse in course and they’re told to produce as much as they can. They are skeptical, but then they’re told they need to do this to feed “our boys” who are going overseas. There’s rhetoric about how it’s a good investment to feed a Russian who, essentially, will take the place of five Americans who could die. That very neatly becomes a need to feed the world after the war.

Lend-Lease leads to this realization that the United States does have this capacity to feed people who are in desperate need, and it can do so indefinitely. It’s a way to reposition farmers and agriculture in the United States into a position of strength, whereas previously they had been seen as this backward remnant of the country. It realizes anew that Jeffersonian yeoman vision as a cornerstone of the country, and it’s not just the country anymore—it’s for the world.

Nutritional science is important here. Milk becomes the “perfect food,” which had always been grain before. The United States assumes a self-interested obligation to take care of the rest of the world because the chaos that could result from us not doing that will ultimately come back to haunt us.

So it’s in the USDA’s self-interest because it keeps their constituency happy and Congress gloms onto that. It helps meet the mission of the State Department, it meets the mission of the Farm Bureau and all these other farm organizations, and farmers, themselves, ultimately like it as well. It feeds into this new sense of mission that everyone has an obligation to be a part of.

Joe EnglemanMore by this author →

Joe Engleman is a writer and communications consultant with a graduate degree in urban planning and policy. His interests include enhancing the solidarity economy, movements for climate and food justice and community wealth building.