Lasley & Ostendorf: Unraveling of Agrarian America
In The Unraveling of Agrarian America: A Retrospective on the 1980s, authors Paul Lasley (Iowa State, Sociology) and David Ostendorf (Community Organizer) recount their observations of and experiences with addressing the Farm Crisis throughout the 1980s. One author is a community organizer; the other is an academic rural sociologist, and together they reflect on what contributed to this difficult and prolonged financial crisis and how this crisis accelerated the consolidation and industrialization of farming and the food system.
The authors wrote this essay based on their personal experiences of the Farm Crisis in Iowa, a state drastically impacted by the economic collapse. During the years of crisis, the authors were on the ground, actively working to respond to the effects of financial collapse in Iowa, while pursuing social, economic, and racial justice in the countryside.
The essay is organized around three stages of the Farm Crisis as these authors experienced it: Early Engagement and Entrenched Denial (1981 – 84); The Tide Turns (1985 – 87); and Resolution and Lessons Learned (1988 – 90 and 2021). In each section, the authors describe the discrete events that provide insight into the driving forces behind this period of economic collapse and recount life as they experienced it in each of the three stages. Together, these viewpoints provide a sharper understanding of the dramatic, concentrated, and dominant economic and political power of global capital controlling the food system. The authors assert that little time was devoted to addressing the major structural causes and outcomes of the Farm Crisis because there was little capacity to counter the industrialization of the food production system or propose new methods of organizing farming that would ensure the continuation of family farms and businesses.
The authors push back on the belief that the Farm Crisis was unique and will never happen again or that safeguards are in place to prevent such recurring financial losses. Instead, they argue the Farm Crisis was a pivotal event in the long restructuring process of rural life and in the concentration of economic and political power pervasive throughout the economy. In contemporary life, the impacts of the Farm Crisis are less visible to the casual observer. However, the Farm Crisis severely penalized some family farms and rewarded others, contributing to the growing inequality across all farm-dependent communities.
Overall, this essay provides insights into how the Farm Crisis forever reshaped rural culture. To learn more about the authors’ experience of the Farm Crisis, visit this link for an interview with the authors.
