| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929. By Paul K. Conkin. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. xiv, 223 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-2519-0.)

This pithy book would be useful for students who need an informative primer on U.S. agricultural history in the twentieth century. With crisp prose and well-chosen examples, Paul K. Conkin sums up what he rightly calls "the most important industrial revolution in American history" (p. 97). Sucking at the government teat of federal subsidies, commercial farmers unleashed a panoply of technologies in the mid-twentieth century, from self-propelled combines to synthetic fertilizers to artificially inseminated cattle. The results included radically boosted farm productivity, cheap food, upended rural communities, and tightly confined animals munching on hormone-laced Roundup Ready soybeans in factory-like settings. Always attentive to the dark side of this agricultural revolution, Conkin nonetheless upholds it as the only viable option for feeding consumers cheaply during an era when most Americans preferred not to labor on farms. In any case, as Conkin demonstrates, federal farm policies since the 1930s have structured the economy in such a way that few alternatives stood much chance.

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