American Farming Culture and the History of Technology

Presenting a history of agriculture in the American Corn Belt, this book argues that modernization occurred not only for economic reasons but also because of how farmers use technology as a part of their identity and culture.

Histories of agriculture often fail to give agency to farmers in bringing about change and ignore how people embed technology with social meaning. This book, however, shows how farmers use technology to express their identities in unspoken ways and provides a framework for bridging the current rural-urban divide by presenting a fresh perspective on rural cultural practices. Focusing on German and Jeffersonian farmers in the 18th century and Corn Belt producers in the 1920s, the Cold War, and the recent period of globalization, this book traces how farmers formed their own versions of rural modernity. Rural people use technology to contest urban modernity and debunk yokel stereotypes and women specifically employed technology to resist urban gender conceptions. This book shows how this performance of rural identity through technological use impacts a variety of current policy issues and business interests surrounding contemporary agriculture from the controversy over genetically modified organisms and hog confinement facilities to the growth of wind energy and precision technologies. Inspired by the author’s own experience on his family’s farm, this book provides a novel and important approach to understanding how farmers’ culture has changed over time, and why machinery is such a potent part of their identity.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of agricultural history, technology and policy, rural studies, the history of science and technology, and the history of farming culture in the USA.

Joshua T. Brinkman is an Adjunct Professor of History at Elon University and Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, USA. His work examines how technology and identity are co-constructed as well as energy, environmental, and agricultural law and policy, with particular focus on the American Midwest.