Agriculture
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Abstract
American agriculture requires surveys that will bring greater comprehension to those involved in agriculture and understanding to urbanites who desire to know about this great part of the nation. Our agriculture, even in its external appearance, is a mosaic of some five million individual establishments. These vary according to the forces of history, economics, and social-political institutions as well as soil types, topography, and climate, but patterns are discernible. Ladd Haystead and Gilbert Fite have achieved a satisfactory sense of unity out of a diverse agriculture by working along the plane of agricultural regions. This top-side view of agriculture is laid over with enlightening information and studded with farsighted observations derived from the authors' experiences with farming and reflection upon the broad course of agriculture's development. The authors had some difficulty juggling the influences at work upon agriculture into sensible regions, bumping into obstacles that prohibit any easy generalization. Erecting regions as groups of states is awkward, for state boundaries are proverbially illogical. Yet, state regulations and agricultural aid institutions are important, and the state base is unavoidable because available statistics are arranged according to those divisions. As a matter of fact, this work is not so much a study of agricultural regions as it is a survey of American agriculture by groups of states. In this survey, the differentiations are relative size of farm, income, crops, volume of production, and cultural practices. Small attention is given to the causes of regional differentiation. The historical perspective is little further back than the World War II period, and despite a complex apparatus showing soil divisions almost no application is made of this in the text. As the authors hope, this book should fill a steady demand for current information on the state of agriculture in this country. There is still room for studies of agricultural regions as regions, and there is pressing need for general surveys of agriculture along the economic, political, and social planes and yet greater demand for thoughtful work on agriculture's historical depths. JAMES H. SHIDELER, University of California, Davis