The obvious response to the title of this post is: I don’t know; why don’t you ask one? Well, Richard Wuthnow and his researches did, at great length. The result is In The Blood: Understanding America’s Farm Families, the last (it was published in 2015) of a list of books which Wuthnow’s extended sociological study of America’s small, rural, mostly agricultural, mostly Midwestern places, and the people who live there, has produced. Earlier this year, while thinking about Wuthnow’s latest book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, I ended up exploring this series by Wuthnow to learn what it can tell us about how those of us who are part of, or next door to, or have memories of, or are in other ways dependent upon, the productive world of those who work the land think about the changing world around them. In The Blood didn’t change my mind about that analysis, but it did deepen it quite a bit.
The clearest point which comes through Wuthnow’s thoughtful engagement with the dozens of farmers he and his assistants interviewed, and with the reams of data about rural populations, farm economics, and more that they assessed, is simply this: most American farmers, most of the time, are not agrarians. This is hardly news to anyone who takes conversations about localism and sustainability at all seriously–but still, for people like me, for whom the appeal of agrarian thinking is strong, such reminders are necessary. When Rod Dreher quotes, as he did just recently, Wendell Berry’s “The Work of Local Culture,” with its determined placing of hope in the few surviving rural places in America–because “rural people…see all around them, every day, the marks and scars of an exploitive national economy….
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