| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.4 | The History Cooperative

Problems of Plenty: The American Farmer in the Twentieth Century. By R. Douglas Hurt. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. xiii + 192 pp. Bibliographic essay, index. $24.95.)
Uniformly praised on its dustcover by the nation's leading agricultural historians, this book delivers a tightly woven description of "commercially oriented farmers" who in the 1920s "climbed on the scientific and technological treadmill and then found they could not get off" (p. 51).	1
In spite of many debates that might have lead to a different outcome, during the early years of the twentieth century, America's farmers "would finally recognize the value of organizing by commodity rather than by vocation or geography" (p. 58). In these commodity areas (i.e., rice, wheat, tobacco, corn, soybeans, peanut, and cotton) farmers organized politically to win federal legislation that established what they envisioned as a fair price (often described as "parity") for their crops. By the 1940s, these commodity producers "considered it an entitlement" to have these fair prices guaranteed by government, but groused about resulting federal farm programs that cost them their "freedom and independence."	. . .

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