So without any options left to the Joads but to abandon their land, into their trustworthy Model T Ford truck went virtually everything they owned, including the pets. Farm animals had no luck at all and were by necessity left behind to die a slow, painful death by starvation, dehydration, or both; millions of cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens were left scattered around the four states most affected by the drought. On the road, the Joad family suffered one disaster after another, but they persevered and finally settled in California, only to encounter a whole new set of social problems. Steinbeck was indeed a savvy observer of the human condition as a whole generation of Americans felt the effects of the damage they’d done to the natural environment. Soon that same generation would enter the bloody conflict of World War II.
The Joads are a skillfully crafted and highly measured collection of American stereotypes, all of whom resonate well with the “common man” theme for which Steinbeck was so famous. He was their bulldog, their champion, their chronicler. He wrote of the injustices confronting most people living in what we would still classify today as an advantaged, enlightened, developed part of the world. Yet The Grapes of Wrath remains one of the most scathing indictments of man’s inhumanity toward man, a darkly painted canvas of grief showing the raw underbelly of government’s and management’s total lack of concern for the welfare of destitute America during the Depression years. The only thing that even comes close in recent U.S. history is the Bush administration’s handling of the mess that followed after Hurricane Katrina struck. Steinbeck would surely have had a field day with that political disaster.
Steinbeck depicts farm life in its worst-case scenario. Management versus unionism, poor dirt farmers trying to eke out a living in a region of the country that was never environmentally suited for crop production, at least not without massive irrigation projects. So powerful and truthful was his writing that it literally changed U.S. and world history. For it, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for best novel. I am continually haunted with each rereading of this depressing story by images and refrains from the collective genius of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, whose pro-union songs echo down the rutted back roads of the desertified Midwest; ghost convoys of overloaded, nearly worn-out vehicles of all sizes and shapes shrouded in a dirt-laden cloud of former farmland, a silence of mass exodus, and of the destitute families who elected to remain and eventually, when all hope was gone, committed suicide in their filthy, dilapidated hovels; the half-buried skeletons of legions of farm animals littering the barren countryside like some collaborative surrealistic hybrid painting by Georgia O’Keeffe and Francis Bacon.
In 535 pages, The Grapes of Wrath brings to a close the final chapter of an agricultural adventure that lasted some ten thousand years. Not a bad life span for any revolution, let alone one involving the actual reshaping of the very environment that spawned us. I once showed the Academy Award–winning film version to a class of mine and was shocked to learn that most of them had never even heard of the novel, let alone the film. Even more shocking was their admission that they did not know who Henry Fonda was. Hoping to somehow connect with these science-driven youth in an otherwise palpable cultural generation-gap moment, and in an obviously heightened state of frustration, I yelled: “For God’s sake, he was Bridget Fonda’s grandfather!” They all relaxed and smiled: “Oh, that Fonda!” There wasn’t a dry eye in the class at the end of its showing, including mine. Many of the students then went on to read the book and were deeply moved by its message.
Four Play
The origins of twenty-first-century agriculture can be traced back to the convergence of four things: the American Civil War, the discovery of oil, the development of the internal-combustion engine, and the invention of dynamite.
The War Between the States nearly consumed a nation divided. Of some 33 million U.S. citizens alive in 1860, nearly 4 million died over the next four-year period, starting on April 12, 1861, and ending on April 9, 1865. Many were civilians. So what else is new? It was the birth of the sharpshooters. Walt Whitman wrote passionately about the war, and young Winslow Homer set off from New York City to illustrate it for Harper’s Weekly. The Civil War was a fight to the finish over the right to control what happened to the country’s cotton crop, the South’s main agricultural product. Opposing slavery was almost an afterthought. New England–based textile and clothing manufacturers wanted unlimited access to the gin-milled cotton and wanted it on their own terms, while the Southern cotton growers wanted the best price for their harvest, no matter who bought it. Conflict ensued, big time. The South ended up selling most of its cotton production to Europe at substantially higher prices than the Northern industrialists could or would agree to pay. In either case, the Yankees reacted quite negatively to Dixie entrepreneurship. For the Southern plantation owners, labor was dirt cheap, enabling them to achieve outrageous returns on their harvests. That’s because they relied on slaves brought over mainly from West Africa as their primary labor force, although indentured white farmworkers were plentiful, too. Besides providing a reliable work force, slaves from West Africa did one other thing that would eventually bring about another remarkable change to the New World: They introduced hookworm parasites into American soil.
As the savagely fought conflict progressed year after year, army recruiters began to feel an increasing lack of support throughout most of the North. A rallying slogan was what was called for.
“Help Bring Back the Cotton to Our Mills So a Few of Us Can Get Filthy Rich”
This “battle cry” would not have resonated all that well with young recruits, nor with anyone else for that matter. Something else was required to differentiate the North from the South. Something with an emotional and moral kick to it. In fact, something that would allow the Northern protestant ethic its fullest range of expression. They settled on the issue of slavery. Abolitionists had repeatedly petitioned Congress to outlaw it long before the war had even started. Now their idea was gaining traction, but for all the wrong reasons; cynics have had a good time pointing out all the false morality issues surrounding the final decision to go ahead with the abolition proceedings. The anti-slavery movement got its way a full two and a half years after the first shots at Fort Sumter were fired, when it was apparent to all, both North and South, that the North might actually lose thanks to General George B. McClellan’s exceptional aptitude for screwing up even the simplest of battle plans. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln finally issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation making slavery illegal. Without slaves, Southern gentlemen would be forced to do all the hard labor themselves. This was never an option, so the war continued on for yet another two and a half years. The turning point occurred in 1864, with the replacement of McClellan with Ulysses S. Grant. The pivotal battle of Gettysburg was won by General George Meade of the Army of the Potomac, who defeated General Robert E. Lee; shortly thereafter, the South surrendered at Appomattox Court House. The war had ended. The rest of the world rejoiced, and slavery was indeed abolished, at least in name. The South sank into an economic blue funk that lasted for some twenty years thereafter, and the Northern mills ended up getting their cotton from places such as India, Central America, and Egypt.
If the South was ever to rise again as an agricultural force to be dealt with (and rise it did), then a new way of farming had to be invented. Enter the discovery of oil and the development of the internal-combustion engine. A political battle for economic supremacy became the singular event that eventually forced Southern landowners to switch to mechanized farming equipment, replacing human labor with gas-guzzling clunkers. It would be the machines, and the many agricultural innovations that took advantage of them, that helped define the second great agricultural revolution.
New Oil
The first site for the production of significant quantities of crude oil in America was Titusville, Pennsylvania. In 1859 “Colonel” Edwin Drake drilled not so deep into the oil se
eped bedrock and struck pay dirt. Oil had been discovered even earlier in Poland, in 1854. This sticky black liquid launched an industry that rapidly spread all over the world, even into Texas. Today the OPEC countries of the Middle East are legend, and oil and natural gas stand alone as the world’s two most important concentrated sources of energy for nearly everything, including the operation of complex farming equipment. For reasons that need not be spelled out since they are so widely accepted, the burning of oil products has also become the bane of planet Earth’s existence.
Internal Combustion
Nonetheless, the discovery of oil was not fully appreciated by all of the inventors of the internal-combustion engine. It was Nikolaus August Otto in Germany in 1861 who discovered that by compressing just the right mixture of air and gasoline in a confined space, then igniting it, enough energy could be released to drive a piston that, in turn, made a flywheel go around, producing work. It was that simple. It should come as no surprise that the first car manufacturers to take advantage of this finding were also located in Germany. Prior to that, steam was used to propel cars, but a number of technical difficulties—including boiler explosions and meltdowns—made traveling somewhat unpredictable. The Stanley Steamer and all its relatives were doomed from the start, as oil became the fuel of choice, even though the Steamer never had a boiler failure that hurt anyone. Then along came Henry Ford, whose innovative ideas resulted in the creation of the assembly line, standardized parts, and a cheap-to-manufacture affordable car that could run on either gasoline or ethanol. This might have created quite a flurry of agricultural activity toward establishing crops that ethanol could easily be made from (corn and other grains) if the politically righteous right had picked, instead of alcoholism, some other nasty habit to focus on, like smoking. But instead, they pressed for Prohibition and most alcohol production came to a dead stop in 1920. Smugglers, gangsters, and moonshiners rejoiced in unison, perhaps even raising a glass or two of their favorite beverage of choice. Some conspiracy enthusiasts feel it was the oil industry that, behind closed doors, put the quash on ethanol fuels by financially supporting the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. Together, these two pieces of legislation made it illegal to manufacture or sell liquors with high alcohol content. In defense of a nonconspiracy explanation, though, on a worldwide basis, gasoline was indeed the choice of all the early manufacturers of automobiles. It’s hard to imagine that the embryonic oil cartel could have engineered such a global solution; it was probably the abundance of crude oil, the ease of making gasoline from it, and its efficiency of burning that made oil the preferred fuel instead.
Henry Ford is also credited with inventing the diesel-powered tractor in 1907. Its introduction rapidly replaced the clumsy, excessively heavy steam-powered tractors popular during the 1800s that often got stuck during springtime planting efforts, especially in already soggy bottomland. They routinely had to be hauled out by teams of horses. Ford’s reasonably priced, lightweight, small, agile farm vehicles rarely got stuck, and the moment they hit the plowing fields they completely revolutionized the way agriculture was practiced, although they did not become widely used until the outbreak of World War I. Today, most of the tractors and other farming equipment in the United States are manufactured by the John Deere Company, headquartered in Moline, Illinois, but hundreds of companies make them worldwide. All use gasoline as their fuel of choice. It’s no wonder, then, that farming consumes some 20 percent of all fossil fuel used in the United States.
Life’s a Blast
In 1847 Ascanio Sobrero, working in his laboratory in Turin, Italy, synthesized the first batch of nitroglycerine, a highly unstable compound, and enabled countless farmers around the world (and a few safecrackers, too), to blow up just about anything they wanted. Unfortunately, it also blew up more than a few of those who used it. In fact, Alfred Nobel’s own brother was killed in an unanticipated explosion in the family nitroglycerine factory in Stockholm, Sweden. Undaunted, and under some pressure from local officials, Alfred moved the whole operation to the outskirts of his native city and continued to tinker with the most explosive substance known to humankind up to that point. Between 1864 and 1867, Nobel discovered that mixing nitroglycerine with clay, making a sort of slurry out of it, stabilized the molecule, rendering it harmless no matter the circumstances. It could be dropped, kicked, even stomped on without so much as the slightest bit of reaction. He dubbed the new product “dynamite.” Today, we mix nitro with common sawdust to produce the same stable mix. Wrapped into thick paper-covered foot-long sticks with a primer fuse and a percussion cap, dynamite could be safely shipped anywhere in the world. It rapidly became the explosive of choice for clearing land. Stumps that once required teams of draft animals and days of effort to pry them out of their rooted strongholds could now be removed from the forested landscape in less than a single day’s work. Empty fields, once virgin woodland, were transformed into domesticated agricultural land. Plowed, then planted with crops like corn and sorghum, virtually any crop could bring in a profit in the early days of Midwest farming. The forest floor was rich in deep, black soil, an ideal situation for any crop species with a penchant for growing in a temperate zone.
Down with Trees!
In the early colonial days, after clear-cutting the forests to make wood available for houses and fuel, New Englanders tried their hand at farming, to no avail. This despite the fact that the friendlier Native Americans helped many a colonist get started with corn. A six-inch-deep hole in the ground, a small fish, and a kernel of corn was all it took, but Europeans—unfamiliar with the need to fertilize in their new homeland—often left out the fish part, and many got the whole thing wrong from the start. Crop failure was essentially a death sentence. Many perished in the early days of settlement due to the lack of a reliable food supply. The soils were too thin and rocky, and even after years of settlers clearing enough land to plant a few staple crops, these farms often failed due to the short summers and long, freezing winters. Dairy cattle and milk products soon replaced farming in the rock-strewn fields of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. In Vermont cheese making and maple syrup production made up for some of the revenue lost due to the impossible farming conditions found there. As farming spread to other parts of the new colonies, New England became better known as a supplier of hardwood furniture and a center for cloth and leather manufacturing—with water-powered mills of all kinds at the heart of it all—than as a producer of food.
The Northeast rapidly grew back the trees cut down for farming. This was because in 1775, Daniel Boone, along with a hardy bunch of like-minded adventurers, breeched the Cumberland Gap, paving the way for a new cohort of immigrants from Europe. It was to become the gateway to the upper Midwest and its verdant, fertile valleys and floodplains. The rivers that wound sinuously just beyond the Appalachian Mountains and whose headwaters lay in the upper reaches of the western slopes of that same ancient terrain—the Susquehanna, Allegheny, and Monongahela—helped to shape the landscape. Together with the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, these waterways became the commercial arteries to Ole Man River, the mighty Mississippi, making this region of North America an ideal place to settle down, farm, and then transport produce by boat to New Orleans and out to world markets. News of the promised land to the west spread fast, and a horde of new wannabe farmers crossed through the Gap and into the history books. The land was rapidly cleared of its hardwood forests, and farming was soon on its way to becoming the most popular work activity in America. By the time Steinbeck began writing about the demise of farms, one in four people lived on one. Food was soon arriving from the Midwest to all parts of the world. New England settled back into an almost exclusively industrial mode, using the leather from slaughtered dairy cows for shoe manufacturing and continuing with its rich tradition of furniture making. In the mid-1800s, the far West was settled and cattle ranching took over as the number-one provider of a nationwide stable food supply, and created a lucrative byproduct
, leather, to boot.
The Louisiana Purchase was made in 1803, and an explosion of exploration ensued. America flexed its new muscle in the War of 1812, and during the time between these two events, even more new farmland opened up as wagon trains by the thousands headed out of Saint Louis—Westward Ho! By the 1850s, America was well on its way to a confrontation with destiny as the South put all of its agricultural eggs in one basket and focused on the single crop of cotton. By 1860 all the ingredients for jump-starting the second great push in farming came together from all points in the Western Hemisphere.
The Vertical Farm Page 6