Since the early days of the Republic, yeoman farmers and farm families have been seen as repositories of American values and traditions, as well as backbones of economics and politics. To foreign observers like De Toqueville or Crevecouer, or the philosopherpresident Thomas Jefferson, such farmers epitomized American ideals of freedom, hard work and individualism in a new nation, 86 percent of whose inhabitants were rural.

Generations of literature, art, political discourse and, in the twentieth century, movies have contrasted rural virtue and urban decay (even though America’s great “sin,” slavery, was essentially rural). Contemporary “country style” decor and crafts and weekend farmers affirm this ideological presence even in an urbanizing nation in which farm life has declined radically in both economic value and numbers of citizens living on the family farm.

Government policies, technology, corporate expansion and globalization since the Second World War have vastly changed the function and meaning of the family farm.

Hence a modern novel/movie like Jane Smiley’s 1000 Acres resituates Kïng Lear as a tragedy of a farm family destroyed by ambitious expansion and modernization. FARM AID concerts, which began in 1985, have allowed artists like Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp to call attention to rural debt and loss of lands to agribusiness and urban sprawl. These concerts have distributed $14.5 million in direct aid and more in research on long-term solutions for family farms and communities.

Farms in the US are generally defined as lands that produce or are capable of producing 11,000 in sales. Most such farms are still family owned (90 percent), although these include family corporations that hire outside labor (for instance, migrant workers are the norm in California). Yet, their involvement in American economic and social life has also changed in important ways in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

First, the diversified and self-sufficient farm, with notable exceptions like the Amish, is a relic of the past. Where in the 1950s, for example, the average dairy holding was 5.8 cows—suitable for family and local needs—by the 1990s it had risen to 61, reflecting a move towards more efficient specialized production. Farmers specialize in one crop oriented to national and global markets—grains like wheat and corn, meat, fruit, tobacco, even specialized truck or organic produce for urban markets. Agricultural sciences have dramatically increased productivity per farm laborer in all of these since the 1940s, making the US the precursor to a global green revolution.

Production is linked to wider networks of support and consumption. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the collapse of the Dust Bowl, government policies have sought to control prices and a regular supply of food to consumers, while also supporting farmers—an incipient conflict met by conflicting regulations. Sometimes, for example, farmers were subsidized to retire land from production, leading to charges of huge subsidies for growing nothing. Since 1992, these policies have changed to even out and limit support without forcing land to be vacant.

Railroads and trucking have tied farmers as well to wide national markets for decades.

Hence, fruit from California, Texas and Florida appears year-round in New York City and Chicago, IL, while production of beef, sugar and chicken has also been regionally concentrated. Transportation has allowed exports of American surplus in grains and other agricultural goods, but has also opened markets to agricultural goods from other nations that are competitive in terms of price, variety or quality Again, the intertwining of family farms and global markets produces both expanded possibilities and new vulnerability.

In the twentieth century, farmers also increased cultural links to wider American populations as automobiles, radios, televisions and computers have ended enforced isolation that once deeply constrained women and families. Indeed, some farms are now linked to rural-suburban combinations (“ruburbs”), where big-box stores like Walmart, technology supplies and urbane conveniences have eclipsed small-town values once associated with, and reinforcing, farm life. New technologies of farming, whether fertilizers and insecticides, newly bred or engineered crops, or expanded production, also demand more expertise—state universities support large agricultural teaching and research establishments—and yet also create dependence on corporate supplies, capital flow and markets.

These changing connections and values of the family farm reached a crisis in the 1970s, when downward prices and the energy crisis hit many farms, especially those that had expanded under younger and more educated owners. While the family farm may continue as a cultural icon, in fact, numbers have decreased from 6 million in the 1940s to roughly 2 million in the 1990s, while the percentage of Americans living on farms slipped from 23 percent in 1940 to under 2 percent. The consolidation of larger corporate agribusiness, the increasing competition of foreign producers and the spread of urban land uses also threaten both this image and reality of the American dream.