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In the Blood
Understanding America's Farm Families
By Robert Wuthnow PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7387-6
CHAPTER 1
FAMILIES
It's in your blood somehow. I don't know how to explain that. I think there are a lot of people who are involved in agriculture in spite of the fact that it's difficult to make a living, just because they can't get away from it.
— Dairy farmer, female, age 57
Things have changed in farming, but the things that have not changed are pride in family, raising a decent family, loving them. Those are my ideas of success.
— Corn-belt farmer, male, age 64
The Jorgensens' intergenerational corn and soybean farm illustrates a pattern that has been present in many farming communities for years. Although Neil is in his forties and has been farming for more than two decades, his parents are still actively involved. Living only a mile and a quarter away, Clay and Mary pitch in during corn and soybean planting and in harvest when extra hands are needed. Apart from Arlene's job in town, the two families' income depends entirely on the land.
Whether they have formed an official partnership with some other member of their family or whether they merely enlist the help of a spouse, parent, child, or sibling, family relationships are the very core of family farming. We wanted to hear what farmers had to say about these relationships. What relationships were involved? Who did what? How were these relationships structured? What was fulfilling about them? What was troublesome? And what were the social norms and values that these relationships embodied?
When Americans talk about valuing their families, the remarks usually emphasize the priority of investing resources in family life. These resources are attained outside the family, such as earning income by working at a job, or are ones that could have been invested elsewhere, such as time spent at home instead of at work. As entities in which resources are invested, families are in this sense units of consumption.
Farms are different. Although farm families are units of consumption, they are also units of production. The Jorgensens produce corn and soybeans. Other families grow wheat or cotton or sell milk and vegetables. Family life and farming are operationally intertwined. Home and business are integrally connected.
In the nineteenth century family involvement in farming was best illustrated in family members' labor and in the fact that most of these activities took place in close proximity to the farmstead. In the twenty-first century the locus of activity and the nature of those activities have changed. But families are still operationally involved and the meaning of farm life rests on that involvement.
The academic literature describing relationships between families and business activities has changed in ways that take account of the greater complexity of these relationships. Earlier arguments stressed the advantages of sharp differentiation between families and business activities. Lacking such differentiation, business activities could be hindered by unproductive family members. Differentiation allowed businesses to hire and reward only the most productive workers. Differentiation involved not only spatial separation but also contrasting legal codes and principles of valuation.
Those arguments reflected scholars' impressions of large industrial enterprises, such as textile factories and steel mills, but underestimated the extent to which efficient business enterprises can also retain close relationships with families. More recent discussions acknowledge those relationships. Family ties can sustain business activities during difficult times and family relationships can be the means through which capital is accumulated and specialized knowledge is shared.
The connection of farm families to farming includes real and symbolic linkages with the farming traditions and values of previous generations. It still involves contributions of labor from family members at least during peak seasons and often consists of complex formal and informal partnership arrangements. These relationships endure but are also being renegotiated as farming changes. Among the most important changes are shifts in gender roles and different modes of transmitting family values to farm children.
FAMILY TRADITION
Herbert and Darla Loescher are dairy farmers. They get up at four o'clock every morning and do the chores together. One gets the seventy cows they own milked. The other feeds the calves and cleans the mangers. The Loeschers are in their mid-forties and have been doing this all their adult lives. Longer, actually. Mrs. Loescher started helping with farm chores when she was eight. Mr. Loescher cannot remember when he started. He just grew up around cows.
The Loeschers live in a tight-knit farming community of German Americans who settled here in the 1870s. Mr. Loescher's grandparents ran a hundred-acre dairy farm and raised five children. Mrs. Loescher's grandparents had a two-hundred-acre dairy farm and raised twelve children. Mr. and Mrs. Loescher were both raised on dairy farms. As children they saw their grandparents almost every day and grew up doing farm chores. They feel strongly that they are following in their ancestors' footsteps by farming. "Once it is in your blood," Mr. Loescher says, "it stays in your blood."
The fact that many if not most farmers were raised in farm families is one of the most distinctive features of farm life. It is hard to imagine any other occupation in which this kind of generational continuity is as important. Even in families in which more than one generation has worked as teamsters or taught school, the chances of more than two generations having been involved and having worked at exactly the same location are lower in most instances than among farmers.
One way of thinking about intergenerational continuity in farming is that it is strictly a matter of economic considerations. Young people wanting to farm have an advantage if their parents and grandparents have farmed, own land that can be passed along, and have machinery to share. Those advantages are important, but they do not illuminate the meanings and values that get passed from generation to generation.
Being significantly connected to the past is as important to the mentality of farming as it is to the economics of farming. This experience of intergenerational continuity is what farmers mean when they say that farming is in their blood. They are following in their parents' footsteps — often in their grandparents' and great-grandparents' as well. They are carrying on a family tradition.
Farm families for this reason cannot be understood in terms of relationships only among the living. It would be inaccurate, for example, merely to count whether farmers were married and how many children lived with them or nearby. Family farming means relating to the past as well as to the present. "The dead are all around," a third-generation farmer noted. "They are with us every day." He meant the parents and grandparents who preceded him farming. Their voices still echoed in his head.
The voices are words passed from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters. They include "little wisdoms," as one farmer put it, such as "live poor and die rich" or "lots of people are smarter than you" or "when there's work to be done, do it." Some of the words are stories. The narratives tell of memorable episodes. The barn caught fire. The young farmwoman whose family once lived down the road died in childbirth. More of the words are cues to ways of being. They encapsulate the family tradition and convey ideas about the meanings of daily life.
Tradition is commonly understood as a way in which authority in social relations gains legitimacy. Traditional authority is legitimate because of how things were done in the past. Knowing that a person's ancestors farmed in this place for several generations gives legitimacy to that farmer's choice of career and indeed to the farmer's sense of how and why things should be done in a particular way.
The dead hand of the past, as the saying goes, casts tradition in a different light. If having ancestors who did things a certain way provides legitimacy, veneration of the past is capable of stifling innovation as well. The fact that family traditions are an important part of farm families' understanding of themselves puts them at risk of either being reluctant to adapt to changing conditions or of being regarded that way.
But family traditions serve purposes other than legitimating the past. They serve especially as the mechanisms through which family members identify and affirm their membership. Traditions are stories told at the supper table, during family gatherings, and in letters and conversations (or as the case may be, in e-mails and on Facebook). Traditions in farm families are communicated in these ways as well as over coffee at the local co-op and while waiting for a spare cultivator part to arrive. They show the relationships among family members. They demonstrate that insiders are better able to understand the stories than outsiders are.
In real life the stories of which family traditions are composed have several prominent themes. Many of the stories are narratives of origin. They demarcate history from prehistory. "See that mound over beyond the barn," a woman who lives on the small truck farm her husband inherited from his parents says. "That's where the Indians used to bury their dead." It reminds her that people were here long before anyone in her family. But she also knows which of her husband's ancestors were the first to farm in the area and when that was.
Sometimes being associated with tangible objects enriches the stories. When families have farmed in the same location for several generations, the stories relate to the old well where the windmill used to be, the rusted horse-drawn plow that has been preserved as an antique, or the butter churn that came with great-grandparents by covered wagon. "The dinner bell out there in the front yard," a woman in the cotton belt explains. "I still ring it on special occasions. It was there when this was a cotton plantation with slaves."
Whether the stories describe mundane farming activities, recount tragedies, or convey humor, the narratives define something special about farm life. They draw distinctions between persons who understand the special meaning of the stories and persons who do not. To truly appreciate the tale, the audience has to share some of the speaker's background knowledge.
An example is a lengthy story a farmer in his sixties told about his grandparents. The story described a Sunday dinner during which his grandparents hosted a college professor they somehow knew and who had little knowledge of farm life. Part of the tale included the cloth convertible top on the professor's car being eaten by goats. Another part involved the professor being told the chicken they were having for dinner had drowned in the horse trough.
The farmer telling the story knew his retelling it was part of an interview for a professor. He also understood that stories like this played an important role in perpetuating the distinctive family meanings he associated with farming. "These stories are very valuable," he said, "because they pretty much define the culture and they define our family values."
Family traditions are mental sinews connecting past and present. Farmers' identities bear specific continuities with previous generations. Their parents not only farmed, they farmed here, in this place, and they raised corn in that field and milked cows in that barn.
Or at least they farmed in the same community. Subsequent generations know where the home place was located. The old barn may have crumbled years ago. The trees may be gone. But in their mind's eye the current generation can visualize the old buildings. Fields are known by their previous owners. That was Joe's place. Over there is where the Dubrovniks lived.
Neil Jorgensen's sense of farming being in his blood is closely associated with having lived in the same place all his life. "It's a pride thing," he says. "You take care of the land and the soil and try to keep it from generation to generation." He values keeping the family's name attached to the land.
The Loeschers have been less fortunate. Although they live in the community in which they were raised, they do not live on a farm that has been in the family for generations. The land they now farm is rented. Their dream is to become landowners like their grandparents.
Traditions rooted in particular spatial connections are strengthened by continuities in the skills involved. Although farming changes from generation to generation, there are similarities as well. Farmers talk about doing things as children that they still do as adults. They often mention helping to feed and care for animals in this regard. The Loeschers have been getting up early to tend the cows for as long as they can remember.
"It was nothing to be up at six o'clock to go out and do hog chores before school," Neil Jorgensen remembers. He started doing this in third grade. Up until a couple of years ago he was still raising hogs. "I've been with hogs all my life," he chuckles.
Clay Jorgensen illustrates another aspect of farmers' relationship with the past. Family connections made it both possible and plausible to farm. He started a year before graduating from high school. His father had died. His mother and brother were keeping the farm going but were struggling. His mother told him she had a tractor and a few implements. He could have them if he wanted to farm. Or she could sell them and he could go to college. College was an unknown world. He had no idea what he could do with a college degree. He opted to farm.
For Mr. Jorgensen farming was a risky choice because his mother had barely enough land for him to eke out a living. But farming was more plausible than any conceivable alternative because there was more to family than simply the idea of farming. His grandfather and two great-uncles were still farming in the neighborhood. He could share equipment with them and call on them for advice whenever he needed it. "If I called on them to help," he said, "they'd come over for a day. We'd make hay and shell corn and maybe do a little of the harvesting together."
Traditions like these were more commonly passed among the farmers we spoke with from fathers to sons than from fathers or mothers to daughters. Girls grew up doing farm chores like boys did. And mothers played important roles, as Mr. Jorgensen's mother did, in keeping land in the family when they outlived their husbands. But farmers we spoke with were more likely to have had parents who encouraged them to follow in their footsteps if they were boys than if they were girls.
The Loeschers are typical in this regard. Mr. Loescher says his parents would have been happy if he had chosen some other line of work, but they clearly hoped he would farm. Seeing his mother working alongside his father on the farm pushed him in that direction. Mrs. Loescher's parents did not encourage her to farm. Her mother had a job in town. Mrs. Loescher grew up thinking she would marry someone who did not farm. She surprised herself by falling in love with a farmer.
One of the instances we found in which the family tradition stemmed more from the wife than from the husband was Janelle and Michael Bower. The Bowers are a couple in their early forties who farm in wheat-growing country. They are fourth-generation farmers who operate a medium-sized farm of about fifteen hundred acres. Mrs. Bower's great-grandfather had been one of the area's first settlers back in the 1870s.
Most of the land she and her husband currently farm was owned by her mother and had been farmed by her father and grandfather. Mr. Bower had grown up in another state and had some farming in his background, but his father had a job in town and only farmed a few acres as a hobby. Mr. Bower imagined he would become a teacher when he graduated from college.
When the Bowers got married, it was her father who persuaded them to farm. He wanted someone to farm with him, did not have a son who was interested in farming at the time, and hoped his daughter would live nearby. Mr. Bower and his father-in-law farmed in partnership for more than a decade before the older man retired.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In the Blood by Robert Wuthnow. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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