It is time to change the way we think of farming. Agriculture is a way of life, not a business. And while we are more and more encouraged to banish from our minds the image of a family farm or the portrait of a local farmer, conceiving of a calling as commerce or business is as dangerous to it as it is to ourselves.

Somehow in the history of America we have lost our fondness for the yeomen farmer. The "cultivators of the earth" who Thomas Jefferson said "are our most valuable citizens" have lost their value, as both cultivators and as citizens. Agriculture has managed to stay lodged in the memory of Americans without maintaining its place in their hearts.

The earliest residents of this continent were tenders of the land. Centuries before Europeans arrived, Native Americans were growing beans, chicle, corn, nuts, peppers, pineapples, potatoes, pumpkins, squash, tomatoes, and a variety of other crops. More than half of the world's crops were first cultivated by Native Americans. Apprenticeships to these first farmers made the first American colonists masters of the land. They swiftly converted their small homesteads and garden plots into large farms and plantations.

By 1850, farmers composed 58 percent of the American labor force and owned more than 2 million farms; by 1880, even though they were a hair beneath 50 percent of the work force, farmers owned more than 4 million farms. In thirty years, the number of farms and tilled acres had doubled. So popular was agriculture that the educated and elite classes looked upon it as a kind of mass delusion or ailment. The Country Life Movement and other versions of Progressivism seized hold of rural America and sought to cure agriculture of its "backwardness." Mechanization and education were melded with condescension and distrust: a farmer was someone to fix and reform, not assist.

Some good did come of this aggressive reform era. The United States Department of Agriculture, started in 1862 under Abraham Lincoln, blossomed into an agency of agricultural extension agents. Educated agriculturalists from land-grant universities were sent into the rural countryside to teach farmers better management practices; these men moved fertilizers, hybrid seeds, crop rotation, and laborsaving machines from factories into the fields. And in 1914, the USDA's Cooperative Extension Service created its 4-H program for youth that has evolved and endured in the form of boys and girls clubs for over 9 million Americans.

The agricultural transformation of America was swift, but sure. At its height in 1915, farming in America involved more than 30 million farmers and over six million acres of land. All good things though end, or at least are diminished. Even before the Great Depression, thousands of farms were foreclosed in the 1920s. Cotton had depleted the soil and slavery had drained the hearts of the South. But when slavery was replaced by sharecropping, the new labor system spread faster and further than servitude ever had. Sharecropping and tenant farming became the only options for newly freed slaves and recently failed yeoman farmers. And when those systems became unsustainable, tenant farmers left the land in swarms.

The Great Transformation was beginning. Already in the early twentieth century family farms were being abandoned or consolidated into the holdings of large landowners. As the nation recovered from the Depression, so did agriculture, but only by transforming itself. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of the New Deal put money in the pockets of large farming operations that acquired efficient equipment and shed their tenants. The New Deal changed rural life more dramatically than any force before it. For every street light that first flickered on a rural highway, a dozen living rooms in a dozen different farmhouses were illuminated for the first time by anything other than sunlight or candlelight.

Streamlining operations and modernizing equipment brought these farms sustainability. Their cycles of planting and harvesting continued to prosper until after World War II, when overproduction caused the market for crops to fall. The federal government brought some relief through farm loans, crop insurance, disaster and drought relief, as well as marketing quotas, but American agriculture had become a leviathan on land.

When life looked more comfortable off the farm, more farmers folded and sold their land. For those who stayed, farming became a dependent profession; only farmers no longer depended on the sun and the rain, but on the state. What had been a labor intensive profession became capital intensive; only large farms could survive and even those depended on subsidies and federal allotments for crop production.

By the 1980s America 's farms were facing another crisis. A crippled beast dragged through the decades, the terrestrial leviathan was tired of begging but too worn down to do much else. The frustrations of American farmers finally made it into the headlines of major newspapers and television networks when the American Agriculture Movement staged a tractorcade in Washington, D.C. in the winter of 1979. Traffic on the streets of the nation's capital was stopped as 1,800 tractors crawled toward the Mall.

That protest did little to change things. According to the last census, there are only 2.1 million farms left in America. Most of these are either small boutique farms or non-family corporations or cooperatives. The family farm is all but extinct. Even worse is the condition of the remainders—agri culture no longer exists, only agri business.

It used to be that a farmer chose his seeds as carefully as a gardener selects his flowers, but crop diversity now is in the hands of a few corporations—Monsanto, Cargill, and ConAgra—who manufacture the seeds and chemicals for the entire world. It used to be that farms were tended to with care and diligence, not plundered and polluted before being sold for development.

The pesticides and fertilizers that wash off these fields settle into drainage ponds and eventually into aquifers; the soil that erodes from these American farms finds its way into American rivers. If we thought of these farmers as men and women and not as businesses and corporations, then we might assist them in restoring what their profession once was. We are so willing to recall the myth of the yeomen farmer, to see him painted in peeling watercolors beside some impossibly bucolic scene, but why are we unable to realize that his great-granddaughter wants nothing more than to farm the way he farmed? Or that the descendent of some tenant farmer evicted from his tenancy during the Great Transformation does not long to own thousands of acres, but simply to care for a small, sustainable plot of land?

Thinking that farmers cannot do it on their own, a slew of books have been published to promote their cause. I take up two of them here, but there are others. And with any luck, still others will be published. None will be so great as that improbable juggernaut of James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but perhaps a few of them will be read widely and will affect the minds of wayward but susceptible persons.

What Evans and Agee managed to do was write a book that looked you directly in the eye. Evans's photographs do not stare so straightly as Agee's words, which strike deeply with every syllable. Their self-effacing reflections on the sharecroppers should be a Bible for anyone aspiring to write a lament of the American farmer.

Melissa Walker is an Associate Professor of History at Converse College, a small liberal arts college near the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina. Her book Southern Farmers and Their Stories brings together 475 interviews with 531 people, outlining what she calls "communities of memory" in southern culture. Her work is careful and kind. She thinks that all her hours of interviewing and all her subjects' years of living can be conveyed in six features of the common experience of southern farmers: self-sufficiency, a strong work ethic, persistence, mutual aid networks, a fealty to the land, and a sense of equality.

Her narrative for the history of agriculture is the replacement of "mutual aid networks" with government policy. Southern farmers might have only noticed it when welfare and subsidies supplanted the seasonal generosity of their neighbors or when their general stores were replaced by chains, but their lives were changed along with the rural countryside. Walker focuses her attention on what southerners remember of these changes, gently reminding us when they misremember or when she thinks they exaggerate their memories.

She rightly points to one of the oddest, but most enduring features of rural life: the distinction between town and county, those who work the land and are one with it and those who feel little if anything for it. Walker 's description of self-sufficiency and persistence are magnified into this sometimes unreasonable othering of anyone who is not a farmer.

Her recognition of this fact helps to explain some of the difficulties with Gary Holthaus's From Farm to Table: What All Americans Need to Know about Agriculture. Holthaus spent three years in southeast Minnesota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin interviewing 40 farm families and his selected interviewees are all compelling studies. My favorite, Mike Rupprecht, is a fifth-generation farmer in the bluff country of southeastern Minnesota who says plainly "I think we're doomed." But then goes on to describe how he and his family have transformed their farm, Earth-Be-Glad, into a viable, organic operation.

Holthaus's book straddles plain text and italics, interjecting description and commentary in between faithful transcription of the words of interviewees. His thoughts and comments are so different from those belonging to the population of his book that they did not need the slant. His characters are all well drawn, but I think he fails at deciding and conveying "what all Americans need to know about agriculture."

But we are talking now of agriculture and the American idea of farming. I think that all you need to know is what you see when you look down from the slender oval of glass in an airplane window at sandy-colored plains or deep green fields, or when you look out the window of your car as you drive through any American agricultural landscape. Whether you count the sunflowers or look quickly between the rows of corn, you know all you need to when you look.

Where I come from farming is still a calling. I knew more farmers growing up than doctors or teachers or store clerks. On the eastern shore of Maryland, agriculture is still the largest industry. Where I come from there are still small farmers with small plots of land.

But those farms are all the time being bought up for housing developments and shopping centers. One of the most menacing facts of contemporary farming is the price of land. Agricultural land easements are the only way of saving these farms from development. Listening to the stories and oral histories of farmers, present and past, convinces us of our task.

Books like Melissa Walker's and Gary Holthaus's right our forgetting of the American farmer. They bring to life those fixed portraits in our minds, calling us to action. It is time to change the way we think of farming.

Casey N. Cep '07 is from a place where farmers grow like weeds.