A Landscape of Abstraction: Agriculture in the American Imagination, 1970-Present

Over the course of the 20th century, American agriculture became a landscape of abstraction, one in which the human relationship to nature through food production was mediated as much by ideals and images as by machines. This project considers how agriculture is constituted in the American imagination, specifically focusing on the period from 1970 to the present, and some of the cultural and political implications of this constitution, especially for the practice of farming itself—essentially, the relationship between cultural ideals and agricultural reality. I argue that during the late 1970s and 1980s abstract representations of the ‘yeoman farmer’ and the ‘family farm’ came to dominate agricultural discourse. This elevation of the farmer had two significant effects on social, economic, and political realities: first, it centered individual actions and responsibilities even as agriculture was increasingly characterized by global interdependence and reliance on abstract systems, and second, it obscured the role of the machine as tool and agent in cultural and political change. The relative invisibility of the industrial reality—the machine—in agricultural discourse obscured the social and economic realities of modern agriculture. These in turn helped to facilitate a strengthening of the global neoliberal economic and ideological program, and therefore the continued dominance and expansion of industrial agriculture.