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Book Review
| On The Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. By Geoff Cunfer. Forward by Dan L. Flores. College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2005. xii+292 pp. Eight photographs, 144 maps, 49 tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.
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| For Geoff Cunfer, land use is the definitive missing link for understanding the Great Plains. While he enhances his story with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century case studies from South Dakota, Montana, Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas, his primary contribution is text and maps using countywide agricultural census data between 1880 and 2000 encompassing all the Plains states. |
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Cunfer finds evidence that contradicts gloom-and-doom views. He identifies three historic periods on the Plains: (1) a period of about fifty years, beginning in the 1870s, when farmers learned which land could be plowed for crops and which was suitable only for cattle grazing; (2) between 1920 and 2000, nearly a century of remarkable agricultural sustainability; and (3) technological innovations, like tractors and irrigation, fed this sustainability in hard times. He adds, "the 265 million acres of unplowed land in the Great Plains represents an enormous stockpile of relatively undisturbed native land cover" (p. 36). This compares to 120 million acres where long-term sustainable farming took hold through the twentieth century. |
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Cunfer breaks down his analysis into chapters on plowing for crops, grazing by cattle, crop diversity, the implications of mechanization, the role of droughts, notably the Dust Bowl, the rise of irrigation from the Ogallala Aquifer, and finally the impact of natural and artificial fertilizers. |
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Cunfer recognizes, but discounts, the changes wrought by the adoption of tractors, the transformations forced by the Dust Bowl, the ubiquity of synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and hybrid seed, along with massive federal subsidies. "Rising and dropping crop prices, changes in federal farm programs, droughts and cold snaps, increasing consumerism and consolidation of farms to ever-larger sizes, all had little impact on basic land use" (p. 35). |
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Cunfer acknowledges that cattle grazing changed the Plains environment, but he says little about how it (as well as monoculture farming) compromised the complexity that characterizes ecosystem health. Cunfer also pays little attention to the dominance of feedlot animals that rarely graze in a field, other than to note that the data about the explosion of feedlot animals between 1945 and 1997 do not exist (pp. 61, 68). He also notes that "Irrigation... changed farming from a low-capital to a high-capital proposition" (p. 176). But this is not developed as a dominant issue for modern Plains farmers. Overall, Cunfer's analysis is less secure after 1940. |
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Two problems can be found with Cunfer's impressive use of census data. First, is "basic land use" the determining feature of today's Great Plains debate? Or is it massive food production, or a rural family farm lifestyle, both outcomes of land-use patterns, which is only one among multiple factors. Second, a strong argument also must be made for the dominant impact of market-based commodity prices, cash and credit from federal farm programs, and the overweening deep pockets of large-scale corporate farming. Cunfer does not address these alternatives. |
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Geoff Cunfer has enlarged, if not deepened, the debate over the identity of the Great Plains. He exaggerates when he claims that "historians improperly neglect land use" (p. 233). While Cunfer addresses the work of Walter Prescott Webb, James C. Malin, and Donald Worster, this reviewer misses any engagement with land-use discussions by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Richard Manning, Mark Fiege, Frieda Knobloch, James Earl Sherow, Eric T. Freyfogle, Paul B. Thompson, and Deborah and Frank Popper, among others. Cunfer adds to the debate when he argues that Plains agriculture is not in risk of collapse, but has demonstrated, by its adaptability to change, more than a hundred years of sustainability. While On the Great Plains is not the definitive corrective that it claims to be, it deserves to join the short shelf of major studies on the enigmatic Great Plains. |
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John Opie is distinguished professor emeritus of environmental history and policy from New Jersey Institute of Technology and a lecturer at the University of Chicago. He is author of books and essays on the Great Plains, including Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land (1993/2000) (Nebraska, 1993) and The Law of the Land (1987/1993) (Nebraska, 1994). He currently divides his time between writing environmental essays and competitive digital photography. |
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