Globalizing and Industrializing Literacies

Trish's blog does a great job of reporting out the Hunt and Day interviews. I'd like to take up a question Trish poses about context. My take will be to address the agricultural economy throughout the 20th century in the U.S.

Part of me wondered where the thirties fit into all of this for Day (and Brandt)? This was the era of the dustbowl and displacement of thousands upon thousands of farm families in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and other states (the top soil literally blew off farms due to over-farming and lack of crop rotation). Franklin Delano Roosevelt came along and created the New Deal to regenerate the US economy in the midst of the Great Depression and part of the package included farm subsidies and price supports for specific commodities like milk, wheat, corn, etc.

As I read Brandt's account of Hunt and Day, I wondered where all that context could fit in here. A reader looking at Day could assume all was hunky-dory in the ag economy throughout the mid-part of the century. Yet this is not really the case. Things were good in the forties b/c of the war, but one's economic fortunes really depended upon what kind of crops you were growing and whether or not you could count on subsidies. Weather, as always, is a factor, too. You can have your whole crop rained out or hailed out if you are growing wheat, apples, or other commodities exposed to unstable weather conditions As my brother always says, being a farmer is like being a high-stakes Vegas gambler. You can lose it all in thirty seconds of hail.

Also, a lot of family farms were highly diversified (multiple crops) and fairly self-sufficientuntil the fifties (which helped prevent total financial loss b/c if one crop failed, you could maybe count on another). Then things started to shift toward monocultures (farming one large commodity crop like corn, wheat, etc).

Granted, Day came of age a bit later in the century, but the agricultural economy was not as stable nationally as it might have been in rural Wisconsin where Day was/is located. The dairy industry is heavily subsidized, so government price supports mean that WWII era dairy farmers and post-WWII dairy farmers could rely on the govt making up the difference in price. So in some ways, there is another layer of sponsorship that needs to be acknowledged for Day--the industry she wrote about as an ag journalist, the small family farm dairy industry, was heavily subsidized by the government. She had Uncle Sam to help her out and a farm economy that had not yet shut out or drove out its family farms (what many of us call agricide).

In Hunt's era (1970s-1980s), milk prices dropped due to increased production of milk and increased competition. We have mega-farms populating the Wisconsin dairy landscape (I went to grad. school in Wisconsin and saw them first-hand). These mega farms draw down heavy subsidies and benefit from farm loan packages that favor capital expansions. The family farm is driven out by those who can produce milk in higher quantity and under more "efficient production" conditions (the farmers who expand their operations and have the capital to invest in more high-tech equipment: more milking machines, higher-tech barns, lighting systems that encourage more milk production and a more intensive milking cycle). Also, the milk processors/distributors (and the consumers) want to pay less for milk (esp. if they shop at Walmart!)--less of the ag dollar goes to the farmer and more to the middleman (processor/distributor/retail outlets) unless farmers can increase their production level and make up the difference with quantity (organic milk production is an exception, of course).

Brandt can't say all this, but this all lurks behind Day and Hunt's narratives. The globalizing and industrializing of agriculture. Here's where globalization comes into play!

Can you tell I'm a farm kid? ;-) My uncle was the Washington state dairy farmer of the year.

Now I don't want anyone to think this is just esoteric knowledge or wacky EILEEN farm kid knowledge. Brandt wants us to think about the economic conditions of literacy. These large historical and economic forces DO matter to Brandt's narrative since both of these women are embedded in a changing agricultural economy. The challenge here is how much can she tell the reader or include? The focus is on the interviewees, so this background info. is really a bit too much, but could it fit in moreso in some of the footnotes and interstitial material?