Farm Factories
Hagen’s research on large-scale corporate “bonanza” farming suggests that these 19th century Northern Plains “farm factories” stand not as the beginning of the modern era of industrialization and corporate ownership of American agriculture (modern agri-business), but rather as heir to a long-standing tradition of corporate farming that began in the colonial Piedmont, and continued in Southern cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations and in the massive wheat farms of California. On the Plains at the end of the nineteenth century – as in the antebellum South, as in California’s great Central Valley in the wake of the gold rush –transportation, capital, and markets converged to reveal the inherently pecuniary aspects of American agriculture and to expose what historian Richard Hofstadter has termed the “agrarian myth.”
In the 1870s, transportation developments, markets, technological improvements and cheap land came together to produce a frenzied boom in large-scale commercial agriculture on the Northern Plains. Absentee investors established a slew of huge “bonanza farms,” many composed of Northern Pacific Railway grant lands. Professionally managed and heavily capitalized, they used hundreds of seasonal migrant laborers—organized in crews according to a strict division of labor—to produce vast quantities of a profitable staple crop, ie. wheat. This type of industrialized farming stood in direct contrast to the small scale, subsistence farms and yeoman farmers traditionally highlighted in accounts of 19th century Plains agricultural history. Bonanza farms on the Northern Plains push that region into the history of large-scale commercial farming in America. Their 1870s fluorescence and subsequent demise reflected the importance of federal land policies, and of technological and scientific advances to American agricultural production. It reflected as well the impact of transportation development and urbanization – concentrated markets for farm products – on national settlement and economic patterns.
Portions of this research serve as the basis for the National Historic Landmark Nomination of the Bagg Bonanza Farm.
In the 1870s, transportation developments, markets, technological improvements and cheap land came together to produce a frenzied boom in large-scale commercial agriculture on the Northern Plains. Absentee investors established a slew of huge “bonanza farms,” many composed of Northern Pacific Railway grant lands. Professionally managed and heavily capitalized, they used hundreds of seasonal migrant laborers—organized in crews according to a strict division of labor—to produce vast quantities of a profitable staple crop, ie. wheat. This type of industrialized farming stood in direct contrast to the small scale, subsistence farms and yeoman farmers traditionally highlighted in accounts of 19th century Plains agricultural history. Bonanza farms on the Northern Plains push that region into the history of large-scale commercial farming in America. Their 1870s fluorescence and subsequent demise reflected the importance of federal land policies, and of technological and scientific advances to American agricultural production. It reflected as well the impact of transportation development and urbanization – concentrated markets for farm products – on national settlement and economic patterns.
Portions of this research serve as the basis for the National Historic Landmark Nomination of the Bagg Bonanza Farm.