| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Deborah Fitzgerald. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. (Yale Agrarian Studies Series.) New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 242. $45.00.

This book is the first to explain systematically the influence of industrialization on American agriculture. Other scholars have explored various aspects of the topic; none has examined it, especially the idea of it, so thoroughly. Deborah Fitzgerald, author of The Business of Breeding: Public Development of Hybrid Corn in Illinois (1990) and an expert on the history of technology, brings her skills to an assessment of modern American agriculture as a whole. The results are impressive, as her thought-provoking narrative offers insights and information often overlooked by social and environmental historians who share some of the same subject matter. Fitzgerald insists that "it is essential to grasp the overarching logic of change" (p. 4) that drove agricultural industrialization in the early twentieth century. In her judgment, that logic emphasized the need to rationalize, systematize, and standardize American farm production. Propounded by agricultural engineers and agricultural economists, the industrial ideal encouraged mechanization and record-keeping, and it depicted the farm as a factory and the farmer as a businessman. Fitzgerald's emphasis on the ideal makes the book seem somewhat like an intellectual history. Yet, as an historian of technology, she highlights the engineers and economists who grounded the ideal in such things as tractors and in such places as the high plains of Montana.

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