Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 150

The American Farm Bureau Federation has held its place as one of the premier organizations representing commercial farmers in the United States for nearly 100 years now. It did not begin its existence as a nationally prominent association, but rather as an intensely local movement focused on organizing and supporting business-oriented farmers similarly to the ways in which business and industry was so effectively organizing and achieving economic and political dominance. This, in essence, is Nancy Berlage’s thesis in her recent book, Farmers helping farmers.

Leaving the later story of growing national prominence to others, Berlage takes readers to the grassroots origins of the Farm Bureau and emphasizes the local links that remained core to the Farm Bureau’s successes at the state and national levels. In these earliest years, small groups of leading farm families recruited like-minded farmers in their communities to create associations that could support each other socially, economically, and politically. Berlage neatly traces that activity through chapters focused on early local organizational structure and strategies and how those built to the eventual state and national organizations with which most historians are more familiar.

While Berlage’s primary focus is the local functions of the Farm and Home Bureaus, she deftly links those developments to the broader national movement embracing organization and efficiency. Just as urban business and industrial leaders were rising to economic and political dominance through their deployment of those doctrines, farm leaders hoped their own adoption of those business principles would convey a forward-looking and efficient business vision in agriculture and help the sector to regain a place at the table of national leadership. For many early Farm Bureau organizers and leaders that effort gained traction through its link to governmental efforts to modernize U.S. agriculture through activities of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Those links to government are detailed in Berlage’s examination of cooperation between local Farm Bureaus and the USDA and state extension services to support county extension agents in their local communities. These were key strategies in early local organizing that lent the weight of Federal and state government to the local bureaus and the legitimacy of local support to the new county extension services. Berlage complicates the more common understanding of that early partnership as dominated by government with evidence of the role played by local farmers in accepting and supporting the arrangement. Berlage also devotes a whole chapter to the way in which local Farm Bureaus strengthened their visibility as progressive leaders, and expanded their memberships, by linking their organizations to the USDA’s fight to eradicate bovine tuberculosis, a widespread contagion that not only reduced the economic value of farmers’ livestock, but also threatened human contagion. Through both collaborations, the Farm Bureau identified itself to national and state professionals and leaders as the representatives of forward-looking farmers in their communities. Such activities advanced the organization’s intent to gain for agriculture the same type of associational relationship to government that professional organizations and leaders in other business sectors held.

Berlage’s work especially shines in its analysis of the place of women and children in the development of local Farm Bureau associations and the Farm Bureau’s vision of their roles in a modernizing agriculture. Having described in her second chapter the ways in which early organizing encompassed all members of the farm family, Berlage returns her attention to women and children in her final three chapters. Two are devoted to examining competing visions of farm women’s place in a professionalizing agriculture sector. The first focuses on the rise of home economics, the extension home demonstration program, and the independent Home Bureaus as offering opportunities for women’s professional and organizational independence. Berlage notes, however, both the promise of intellectual and institutional leadership that separate organization offered and the limits it could pose through its definition of separate spheres and potential exclusion of women from a role in farm production. The second describes the alternative approach of integration into the Farm Bureau organization modelled on the integrated farm family unit, which allowed women to initiate projects and take leadership roles across the range of home, family, and productive activities of farming. While leaving women free from the limitations of separate spheres, Berlage points out that women could find it difficult to assert their views in the integrated organization. Berlage’s final chapter analyses the Farm Bureau’s approach to youth work, which tied together, although not without tensions, the organization’s emphasis on the professional, specialized vocational skills of farming and the centrality of family as the productive core of American agriculture.

Berlage’s well-written study provides a long-missing understanding of the Farm Bureau’s early years and grass-roots origins, drawing an important and illuminating connection between local farm organizing and the broader emphasis on organization and efficiency in business, industry, and government of the period. She makes clear the social and cultural appeal of the organization for families and communities and delves deeply into the ways that women and children benefited from, defined, and were defined by the organization. Room remains for other historians to expand this research to other regions, exploring whether the same local orientation and social and cultural approaches characterized the organization’s early years outside the Northeast and Midwest communities that are Berlage’s focus. Room also remains for others to fill in the gap between her narrative of the local community origins of the Farm Bureau and the more familiar narrative of the Farm Bureau’s later role as a power in national farm politics. In both cases, however, the foundations for that further research are securely laid, and all historians with an interest in the American Farm Bureau Federation and in American agriculture in the early twentieth century will want to be familiar with Berlage’s work.