Steven Stoll

The fruits of natural advantage : making the industrial countryside in California

The once arid valleys and isolated coastal plains of California are today the center of fruit production in the United States. Steven Stoll explains how a class of capitalist farmers made California the nations leading producer of fruit and created the first industrial countryside in America. This brilliant portrayal of California from 1880 to 1930 traces the origins, evolution, and implications of the fruit industry while providing a window through which to view the entire history of California. Stoll shows how California growers assembled chemicals, corporations, and political influence to bring the most perishable products from the most distant state to the great urban markets of North America. But what began as a compromise between a beneficent environment and intensive cultivation ultimately became threatening to the soil and exploitative of the people who worked it. Invoking history, economics, sociology, agriculture, and environmental studies, Stoll traces the often tragic repercussions of fruit farming and shows how central this story is to the development of the industrial countryside in the twentieth century.

The Smallholder's Dilemma

Nearly absent from the current popular interest in food is a sense of the political and ecological implications of corporate control over agriculture and the countryside. In Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food, George Pyle expresses anger for the way that corporate agriculture and the United States government have shaped production by producing food of low quality while pushing out small-scale farmers. The logic of small-scale farming is the subject of a series of books that might be called the agrarian school of political ecology—the study of land and its control as a political process, with social as well as environmental implications. The books considered in this article consider swidden agriculture, farming for use value rather than exchange value, and the history of small-hold farmers in Europe and east Asia. All of these books speak to the independence of farmers as indistinguishable from the way they farm.

The Captured Garden: The Political Ecology of Subsistence under Capitalism

Household subsistence food production did not disappear under capitalism; instead, it functioned within the circulation of capital. British lords and American mining company managers realized that the same practices that once resulted in autonomy for peasants and mountain-dwelling households could be absorbed, “captured,” to subsidize wages. This article considers the captured garden in two forms. The first resulted in capital accumulation, while the second sustained the unemployed without public assistance. Both appeared in West Virginia between the 1880s and the 1930s. Gardens moved into the coal camps, encouraged and compelled by the companies. During the Great Depression the Roosevelt administration established the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, combining gardens and factory wages as a relief program. Both forms illustrate the paradox of subsistence production under capitalism: A practice that for centuries created no surplus value could be made to do just that; an institution once the stronghold of the household could cause dependency and immiseration.

A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (review)

export trade, MacLachlan does not elaborate on the reasons for their failure. MacLachlan’s discussion of the effect of technology on packing-plant operations is thorough and illuminating. He documents the progress of packinghouse practices through the period of brute force to the development of mechanized tools and electronic sensors that guide the rate of progress on the disassembly lines. He further argues that packinghouse conveyors inspired Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line, and he credits the Canadian Can-Pak system of continuous on-the-rail dressing for a 40percent increase in production. On the other hand, he sees this technology as diminishing the need for skilled labor in packing plants. Other technological applications include electrical carcass stimulation to improve palatability and steam pasteurization to reduce pathogenic contamination. MacLachlan feels that animal welfare is addressed through technological advances such as specially curved drive alleys that increase the comfort of animals going to slaughter and a system for detecting whether or not an animal had been under stress immediately prior to slaughter by testing its carcass. This is more than a study of meatpacking or the technology that enabled its development. MacLachlan also integrates labor and the dynamics of retailing and marketing into his discussion. The path of the historic players in the meatpacking industry provides a further unifying ingredient to his overall theme of transformation. Because of its frequent references to practices in the United States, Kill and Chill will have relevance to scholars there. In a Canadian context, MacLachlan places the national beef-cattle industry in historical and contemporary perspective, and in this sense his study stands alone in its field.