Automation
Agribusiness futurism of the 1930s emerged in the context of corporate warfare against labor, making them the design components of the forms of “farm fascism” analyzed by Carey McWilliams. Just a few years after the new, streamlined tractors began appearing in the San Joaquin Valley, McWilliams published his study of California agriculture, Factories in the Field, in which he analyzed the “new type of agriculture” that had been created there: “large scale, intensive, diversified, mechanized.”
He begins with the wheat boom of the 1870s and 1880s, when big California growers were early adopters of the huge new combine harvesters and the state became a giant laboratory for forms of agricultural mechanization that would be exported to other parts of the United States and the world. In the 1910s and 1920s, agricultural engineers and farm implement manufacturers produced bigger and better tractors and combines for California with the express goal of eliminating workers.
The decade of the 1930s witnessed intensified efforts to organize agricultural workers in the fields and canneries, leading to numerous strikes and violent, sometimes fatal attacks by management and police. At the same time, state and corporate-sponsored researchers developed new mechanical planters, cultivators, and sorters that further mechanized the fields, packing sheds, and canneries.
He begins with the wheat boom of the 1870s and 1880s, when big California growers were early adopters of the huge new combine harvesters and the state became a giant laboratory for forms of agricultural mechanization that would be exported to other parts of the United States and the world. In the 1910s and 1920s, agricultural engineers and farm implement manufacturers produced bigger and better tractors and combines for California with the express goal of eliminating workers.
The decade of the 1930s witnessed intensified efforts to organize agricultural workers in the fields and canneries, leading to numerous strikes and violent, sometimes fatal attacks by management and police. At the same time, state and corporate-sponsored researchers developed new mechanical planters, cultivators, and sorters that further mechanized the fields, packing sheds, and canneries.
McWilliams concluded that “the eventual mechanization of most types of agriculture is a foregone conclusion,” and that the resulting displacement of workers would spur future efforts at unionization, which is more or less what happened. Agribusiness efforts to design a future free from conflict between capital and labor actually reproduced and extended such conflicts.
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