Cultivating Discourse: The Social Construction of Agricultural Legislation

Abstract

In this article we initiate a critical analysis of the discursive geographies from which U.S. agricultural legislation has been constructed. First, we refer to the geography of discourse, which consists of the production, dissemination, and consumption of ideas, concepts, theories, and understandings. Specifically, we trace the emergence and development of an American agrarian discourse, constituted from a wealth of ideas and theories concerning the place of farming in American society and the embodiment of these lines of thought in the agricultural legislation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We highlight particular discursive sites and the establishment of expert groups and associated institutions, as well as time and place specific understandings of farmers and farming. The second dimension we draw out focuses on the semantic geography of discourse itself: It is through discourse that objects of debate—such as people and place—are demarcated and placed in relation to each other. In this case, farming and farmers have been understood in relation to a series of binaries (free/fettered, family/corporate, rural/urban, welfare/investment, safety/risk, individual/social, us/them), one side of which becomes valorized as “ideal” or the “norm.” We explore the semantic geography of agricultural legislation by focusing on one discursive site, namely the U.S. Senate, and the debates leading to the passage of the 1996 Freedom to Farm Bill.

Key words:

• discourse
• social construction
• U.S. agriculture

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the constructive comments offered by seven anonymous reviewers on previous drafts of this article.

Notes

Sources: Cochrane and Ryan (1976); Rapp (1988); Schapsmeier and Schapsmeier (1992); Bradley (1995); Congressional Digest (1996).

Sources: Hosansky (1995a, b, c, d, e, f; 1996a, b, c, d, e, f, g).

Source: USDA (1996).

1. This separation is for analytic purposes only. Clearly, given the poststructuralist framing of the essay, there is no intent to ally the geography of discourse with the “material” realm, which somehow “produces” such discourse. The discursive sites wherein knowledge is actively produced—and the “social,”“political,” and “economic” processes within which they are embedded—are just as much the product of social construction. In similar vein to legislation, such sites are usually taken for granted, and are rarely the focus of investigation into how they were constituted.

2. On the play of binaries, see Willems-Braun (1997).

3. In general, poststructuralism as an organizing framework for discussion is much more visible in overviews of the discipline (see, for example, Dixon and Jones 1996, 1998) and subfields such as cultural geography (see, for example, Willems-Braun 1997; Sparke 1998) and urban geography (see, for example, Clarke 1997). And its application to specifically agricultural subjects is more apparent outside of the discipline. In sociology, for example, an interest in deconstructing agricultural legislation has emerged (DuPuis 1999), while other analyses of the construction of rural discourse have addressed environmental and nature issues (see Bell 1994; DuPuis and Vandergeest 1996). In history, Bradley's (1995) deconstruction of agrarian mythology illuminates the connections between broader-scale ideologies and the production of agricultural policy.

4. For example, Grant (1979) that southern congressional leaders were heavily influential in shaping agricultural legislation in the 1920s and early 1930s, and Schapsmeier and Scahpsmeier (1979) discuss the significant involvement of southerners in farm policy from 1933 to 1961. According to Saloutous (1979), the American Farm Bureau Federation gained its earliest strength in the Midwest and East. Finally, whereas farmer unrest in the South became less visible and demonstrative after World War II, in the Midwest “farmers seem to have been in a perpetual state of agitation” (Saloutous, 380).

5. California agriculture, for example, differs considerably from agriculture in most of the country in both the commodities it produces (specialty fruits and vegetables) and in organizational form (heavily corporate employing wage laborers). Farmers are not heavily subsidized, and, according to Vaught (1997) their discursive understandings of farms, farming, and farmers/farm workers, while certainly definitive at the regional level, are not formative of post–World War II federal agricultural policy.

6. We emphasize that in this article we are dealing only with selective circuits of knowledge. Certainly one could considerably broaden the discursive geography within which knowledge concerning U.S. farming is constructed, drawing in contributions from other groups such as congressional committees (particularly the Appropriations and Budget committees) and lobbyists representing a variety of interests (e.g., the Farm Bureau, social reformers/activists, environmental groups). The policies and pronouncements highlighted in this article are but one particular nexus of meanings, indicating the infinite discursive geography within which farmers and farming are “placed.”

7. Hurt (1994,; 73) argues that the agrarian ideal of American farming and rural life is “more fiction than fact”: it bears little resemblance to the actual nature and organization of farming in the U.S. and is highly exclusionary. For example, “[S]hare-croppers and tenants…had no freedom of production or independence born of landownership…For them, agrarian life meant hardship, poverty, and subordination so that the landowner could enjoy wealth, independence, and leisure” (Hurt, 74). Furthermore, while “agrarian life offered prosperity and civil rights to men, it promised only hard work and continued subservience for rural women, white and black, slave and free” (Hurt, 74).

8. These included The Patrons of Husbandry (“The Grange”) in the 1870s, the Farmers’ Alliance in the mid-1880s, and the Populist Party in the 1890s.

9. Such concerns were premised upon the belief that a dynamic agrarian sector is necessary to fuel industrialization by facilitating the transfer of labor and capital from the countryside to the city. If agriculture lags, so will industrialization (see Bonnen 1992).

10. Efforts to bolster household production in the nineteenth century were connected to fears about a peasant class reasserting itself in the rural landscape (see Bonnen 1992; Danbom 1995).

11. The plan was to set a target or hypothetical price at income parity in advance and then make up the difference between the actual price received on the market with a direct payment to the farmer (see Bradley 1995).

12. The grain embargo against the Soviet Union in 1980 further cut into the markets of U.S. farmers. Despite declining market outlets, the 1981 farm bill encouraged continued overproduction by setting target prices above plummeting market prices. From 1982 on, Ronald Reagan's economic policy of cutting taxes and fighting inflation with high interest rates was blamed for declining farm prices that were most pronounced in food and feed grains (Rapp 1988). This forced farmers to service massive debts with reduced incomes. Whereas farm prices had stood at 71 percent parity in 1979, by 1986 they had declined to 51 percent of parity—a lower level than during the Great Depression.

13. According to Barlett (1993), some farmers described their current crisis as worse than the Great Depression, primarily because the costs of production and debt had risen tremendously since the 1930s.

14. Films such as Country, the Farm Aid Concert in September 1985, and other media events brought the crisis to the attention of the public, which responded with support for government programs to assist farmers (see, for example, Anthan 1987).

15. One of the most visible and influential of such coalitions was the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition, which operated out of Des Moines, Iowa.

16. As Roberts and Dean (1994) note, an understanding of the place of farmers within the broader environmental system was also embedded in this legislation, at the behest of the Conservation Coalition.

17. In this section, we primarily utilize comments made during the Senate debate that appear in a special issue of Congressional Digest 75 (4) (April 1996), which will not be individually referenced. Any quotations drawn from other sources are referenced separately.

18. The emphasis on the “individual” as opposed to “society” has, of course, a long history (see Kingdom 1992).

19. In 1995, Wellstone had proposed a targeted approach to marketing that would provide planting flexibility as well as long-term protection from uncertainties of weather and markets by raising loan rates and targeting benefits to family-sized farmers.

20. For some, no argument could justify state subsidization on this scale. According to the lone Republican to vote against the bill, Senator McCain (R-AZ): “We are acquiescing to the well-organized interests who are satisfied with nothing but a bigger trough from which to feed” (Hosansky 1996f,; 874).

21. Synonyms for “human capital” include “knowledge worker,”“knowledge capital” and “intellectual capital.” The notion that human beings may be regarded as analogous to physical capital (where capital is defined as a produced means of production) can be traced back to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations ([1776] 2000). The term “human capital” was more recently coined by economists Schultz (1961) and Becker (1964) to draw an analogy between investing resources to increase the stock of ordinary physical capital (tools, machines, buildings, etc.) in order to increase the productivity of labor and investing in the education or training of the labor force as an alternative means of accomplishing the same general objective of higher productivity. Clearly, it is the abstraction of various industrial practices to the level of costs that allows the transplanting of such a strategy from one context to another.

22. U.S. companies, particularly those involved in agriculture, have used Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to petition the government to intervene in trade relations. If it is found that “hidden” barriers to American exports exist, the U.S. can choose to impose sanctions against the country involved. Of course, U.S. legislation also allows for the protection of the “domestic” market. U.S. companies can appeal to the U.S. International Trade Commission for protection if they believe subsidized foreign imports are “unfairly” undercutting their market. Tariff-rate quotas can also be sustained under the 1994 General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs of the World Trade Organization—especially important in limiting imports of beef, sugar, peanuts, and many dairy products—and under the provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

23. The pervasiveness of this us/them binary can be seen in subsequent comments on the 1996 FAIR Act. In the year following the passage of the act, for example, Gary Hanman (1997), Chairman of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives (NCFC), stated in his address at the NCFC annual meeting:

 While a farm bill is always a challenge, it was even more so this past year as a result of…an increasing awareness that U.S. agriculture must compete in a global economy…The key to the success of the new farm bill and the future growth of our industry depends heavily on U.S. agricultural exports…It's not enough to be economically competitive. Our policies and programs must also be competitive with those of other countries.

24. See, for example, Rosenau and Czempiel (1992), Florini (2000), Giddens (2000), and Nye and Donahue (2000).