The most effective way of compensating for the loss of farm labour was to mechanize. Mechanization had been progressing slowly in the 1930s but the lack of profits and farm capital held the process back. War guaranteed the farmers high prices for their produce but it also pushed up the wages for labour. This created an even greater incentive to replace men with machines, and increased profits enabled farmers to buy in new machinery. Steel shortages meant that agricultural machinery was rationed; nevertheless, of all the countries in the world the United States had sufficient raw materials and labour to spare in order to produce enough tractors, combine harvesters and milking machines for the number of these machines in use on American farms to double between 1941 and 1945. Maize- and cotton-pickers and threshers became commonplace.28 The rural electrification programme, which had begun in the 1930s, was extended to the point where electricity had become a standard utility for nearly half of America’s farms by 1945, allowing the introduction of electric milk-coolers, feed-grinders and heating systems for chicken coops.29
The spread of machinery was matched by increased use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. The United States, Canada and Britain combined their resources and this meant that they were the only countries in the world with sufficient raw materials to allow them collectively to increase their use of artificial fertilizers while still producing explosives. The United States government set up ten synthetic-nitrogen-processing plants and greatly increased its mining of potash and phosphoric rock. Most of the production was channelled into the explosives industry but there was enough available for American farmers to triple the amount of fertilizer they used, thus ensuring that the United States, Canada and Britain were the only countries that possessed agricultural soil which had not been severely depleted of its nutrients by over-farming by the end of the war. There were extreme shortages of pyrethrins, most of which were made in Japanese-occupied south-east Asia. They were used to manufacture insecticides for use in agriculture and for troops fighting in the tropics. But imports of pyrethrum from daisies grown in Kenya meant that American farmers were able to increase the use of arsenate and calcium arsenate insecticides.30 In addition, the widespread introduction of hybrid seeds and selective breeding for livestock allowed great strides to be made in increasing yields. Thus, while virtually every other nation struggled to maintain, let alone increase, its agricultural productivity, US agriculture ended the war with productivity having risen by somewhere between 11 and 30 per cent.31
In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt extolled the virtues of America’s farming population. He told Congress that ‘our civilization rests at bottom on the wholesomeness, prosperity, of life in the country. The men and women on the farms stand for what is fundamentally best and most needed in our American life … [W]e need the development of men in the open country, who will be in the future, as in the past, the stay and strength of the nation in time of war, and its guiding and controlling spirit in time of peace.’32 But this romanticized notion of farming as a way of life gave way as market forces reshaped farming into a business which faced the same sorts of competition and price pressures as industry, where the constant demand was that more should be produced for less.33 By rejuvenating the market for food the war enabled farmers to take advantage of new scientific improvements. But fertilizers, insecticides, machines, hybrid seeds which needed to be bought in each year (formerly farmers had saved a part of the previous crop for seed), and selective breeding for livestock, all demanded more and more capital (rather than labour) investment. Small farms had begun to disappear in the 1930s as the New Deal’s farming subsidies favoured the larger farms which agrarian reformers concluded were better able to meet efficiently the needs of the vast nation.34 This process accelerated during the war. Just as the government awarded industrial war contracts to large businesses (more than half of the $175 billion spent went to ‘just thirty-three firms’), agribusinesses were favoured by agricultural wartime spending.35 Farm and commodity lobbies, which became increasingly influential, also tended to promote the interests of large-scale farmers at the expense of the small and marginal.36 The size of America’s farms increased, while their number declined.37 In the south, large, fully mechanized agribusinesses moved in and the dispossession of the mainly black share-croppers, which had begun in the 1930s, was virtually completed.38
Seabrook Farms in New Jersey is an excellent example of the way in which, during the first half of the twentieth century, American agriculture transformed into an industry and of how this development was consolidated during the Second World War. Charles F. Seabrook, always known as C. F., took over a fruit and vegetable farm from his father in 1913. He hated the dirtiness of farming and his real ambition was to become a construction engineer. He did eventually qualify in engineering and set up a construction company. Meanwhile, he applied his engineering interests to farming. Having noticed an ingenious method whereby a neighbouring Danish farmer irrigated his vegetables by means of iron pipes, he experimented, and in 1920 Seabrook Farms possessed the largest overhead irrigation system in America. C. F. indulged his passion for construction by building a highway that linked his farm to the large customer bases in Philadelphia and New York. On the farm he built power- and food-processing plants, a cold-storage warehouse, a sawmill, water storage and pumping stations to feed the irrigation pipelines, as well as houses and a school for the workers and their families. By the First World War it was a small self-contained industrial village and the farm prospered, supplying the United States army with fresh and canned fruits and vegetables.39
C. F. failed to withstand the decline in demand once the war was over and in 1924 he went bankrupt and was bought out of the farm, only to buy it back in 1929 with the proceeds of his construction company. By then his sons Belford and Jack had joined him in the business and it was their ingenious ideas that kept the farm afloat through the difficult years of the Depression. Their strategy was to add value to low-priced and unwanted crops, which otherwise would have been left to rot in the fields. Cabbages were turned into cans of sauerkraut, and the farm bought up skinny mid-western cattle at low prices and added the meat to their potatoes and carrots to make canned beef stew. The cans were sold to the state for its programme of food distribution to the poor.40
But it was the freezing industry that really rejuvenated the farm. In the 1910s Clarence Birdseye had learnt about freezing food while living with the Innu in Labrador. General Foods patented Birdseye’s freezing technique and in the late 1930s C. F. signed a contract with them. As a result Seabrook Farms became the largest frozen foods company in America, controlling the process from seed to packages of frozen food. The farm developed new varieties of vegetables which were more suitable for freezing. The latest technology was used in the 20,000 acres of fields, from power tractors, many-disc ploughs, four-row cultivators, and the latest fertilizers, which, alongside pesticides and fungicides, were sprayed on the crops by aircraft.41 Large vegetable-processing assembly lines were built on the farm, and refrigeration and cold storage facilities expanded. The workers’ village grew into a small town.42
When America entered the Second World War Seabrook Farms was poised to take advantage of the boom in demand for food, especially easily transportable food. Stimulated by domestic demand, as a result of the shortage of canned items, the frozen food industry doubled its output during the war. Indeed the amount of vegetables grown for processing in the United States increased by a staggering 91 per cent. Many of the potatoes, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, cabbage, beets and tomatoes were dehydrated for the military. But realizing that dehydrated vegetables were unlikely to be a roaring success after the war, the food-processing industry was much more interested in expanding its freezing capacity.43 Meanwhile, Belford Seabrook was sent to Australia to teach farmers there the art of industrialized vegetable production to feed the US troops fighting in the Pacific.
In 1943 Seabrook Farms produced 60 million pounds of vegetables and employed 7,500 workers around the cloc
k at harvest time. The farms’ demand for labour was insatiable and the Seabrooks solved the problem of wartime labour shortages with their customary ingenuity. Every summer a group of black female college students from Atlanta were flown in, along with a contingent of chaperones. The women slept in a large barrack with bunk beds, and sorted peas, beans, spinach, strawberries, corn and beets by day. The field work was done by hundreds of men hired in from the West Indies, who earned fifty cents an hour and sent most of what they earned back home to their families.44 Once the Japanese-American internees were released from the camps in the west, Seabrook Farms took 2,500, who were joined in the summer of 1944 by German prisoners of war. In 1945 the farm found room for 600 Estonians from displaced-persons camps in Germany.45 C. F. liked to present the farm as a paternal enterprise which humanely gave work to unwanted ‘enemy aliens’. But his sons recalled a cold and rather heartless man and the memories of the workers confirm that while agribusiness was good for the farmer it was a rather less joyful development for agricultural labourers.46 As it was a long way to the nearest towns, the workers were forced to buy their food and other necessities from over-priced company stores. Their dominant memories were of long hours, poor pay – unions had been withdrawn from the workers on the farm when strikes in the early 1930s had disrupted production – and segregated, purpose-built villages of concrete block houses.47
In the post-war years, American agricultural productivity increases continued until by the late 1980s one farmer, who would have been able to feed about ten people in the 1940s, could produce enough to feed ninety.48 The face of American agriculture changed dramatically. In the south cotton was no longer the king of crops, and black farmers had virtually disappeared. In California rice became an important crop, while speciality crops (mainly fruits and vegetables) were now grown on large-scale holdings. Across the north dairy cattle remained important but in the mid-west corn, hogs, poultry and soya beans became the dominant crops.49 Before the war the Americans had used soya beans to provide protein in animal feed but it was indigestible for chickens and pigs. It was not until the 1940s that research developed a technique for deactivating the enzyme inhibitor in the meal, which allowed these animals to tolerate the feed. Their high protein content made the beans a useful meat substitute and American soya bean flour became the main ingredient in British sausages. Vere Hodgson in London commented that ‘Thursday I have an order with the Dairy for a pound of sausage. These make-do for Thursday, Friday and part Saturday. No taste much of sausage, but are of soya bean flour. We just pretend they are the real thing.’50 The United States also sent out self-heating tins of soya chunks to help feed the Indian army, which by reason of religious taboos was not very keen on corned beef or canned pork. But they went down like ‘a lead balloon’.51
Soya was given an immense boost by the loss of the vegetable-oil-producing countries in the Far East. The growing Allied reliance on margarine to compensate for the decline in butter production, and the use of glycerine (which could be extracted from the beans) to make explosives, led to the doubling of the area under soya from 5 to 11 million hectares.52 Already in 1939 Illinois was known as the ‘Manchuria’ of the United States, producing more than one-half of America’s soya beans. The farmers complained that the crop robbed the soil of nutrients but the profit motive for growing soya was too powerful. A new, fattier bean known as the Lincoln was developed by the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, and the Secretary of State for Agriculture guaranteed a generous wartime price per bushel which amounted to twice that paid for corn.53
Until the Second World War Americans were resistant to the charms of margarine. It had been invented by a French food chemist, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, in 1869 for the French navy as a cheap and calorific butter substitute which would not go rancid on long voyages. In 1902 the German discovery of hydrogenation (by which unsaturated fat in reaction to hydrogen turns into saturated fat) meant that margarine could be made from plant oils rather than the original ingredients, which included cow’s udder, milk and sodium bicarbonate. Its name came from the Greek magarítes for pearl because of its pearly white sheen. Yellow dyes were mixed in to make it look more palatable and buttery.54 By the 1930s Germany, in particular, had become dependent on margarine as a butter substitute for the poorer sections of society.55 But in America dairy farmers did not want it to undermine butter production and they lobbied for heavy taxes on the substitute, especially the more appetizing yellow-coloured margarine, which was forbidden in some states.56 The agricultural administration’s failure to boost wartime milk production sufficiently meant that nutritionists recommended vitamin-A-fortified margarine as a replacement for butter. Housewives took to the product with enthusiasm. One reported that although ‘all had been against it at the start’, women were now ‘unanimous in their praise of oleo [as in its original French nameoleo-margarine] … Our butcher can’t keep up with the demand.’57 An Illinois state booklet, Home Budgets for Victory, recommended margarine in sixty-eight of its recipes. Surveys showed that even the households of the anti-margarine dairy farmers were using the butter substitute. In 1950 the extra taxes on margarine were abolished.58 The war had firmly established margarine as an everyday American food. In turn, this helped to establish soya as an American crop.
At the end of the war American scientists learned from their defeated German colleagues how to counter soya oil’s unpleasant smell. From then on soya’s share of the United States’ edible oil exports rose dramatically, reaching 20 per cent in 1950.59 Soya flour was also seen as a way of meeting the need for high-protein flours to feed undernourished newly liberated European civilians. Facilities for milling the beans into flour were expanded. Under the Marshall Plan soya flour, oil and feed exports to Europe were heavily subsidized as a cheap way of feeding hungry Europeans.60
This has led to largely invisible but none the less significant changes in the western diet since 1945. Soya has now become a dominant element in European animal feed and is ubiquitous in processed foods, such as bread, biscuits, cakes, chocolate bars, breakfast cereals, soups, margarine and processed meat, to which it is added in a variety of forms as soya flour, oil, lecithin, protein or as a flavour enhancer.61 From its pre-war position as a smelly and indigestible bean, soya has become one of the three staple crops eaten by Americans. Today soya provides 257 of the average contemporary American’s daily intake of calories, while wheat provides a further 768 and corn another 554 calories.62
The enormous success of the lucrative American soya business also had its more dubious side-effects. The impact of soya products on human health is a matter for some concern. While the Japanese ferment soya beans to make tofu, miso and soya sauce, western processing of soya to produce vegetable oils and soya flour does not involve fermentation. Unfermented soya products contain phytoestrogens which mimic human oestrogen and some medics fear that if unfermented soya is consumed in large quantities it can affect the development of the reproductive system and fertility.63 Soya beans also loosen the soil far more than other crops, and in the American west, which had already lost much of its soil in the 1930s, the expansion of the crop undermined a very real need to concentrate on soil conservation, especially when the problem of drought and soil erosion returned in the 1950s.64 Nowadays, soya farming is expanding in environmentally sensitive areas in Latin America, undermining the ecosystem of the Brazilian Cerrados plateau and threatening to encroach on the Amazonian forest.65
America ended the war virtually the only country in the world with a booming agriculture sector. Its civilians barely suffered any hardship with regard to food supplies and its army was the best fed throughout the war. Yet the US was still able to supply its allies with large quantities of much-needed food. In price terms the amount of agricultural exports tripled.66 In 1945 the United States War Food Administration summed up the importance of food as a ‘weapon of war. As such, it ranks with ships, airplanes, tanks and guns. Food, particularly American food, has been especially crucial in the presen
t war, because it has been essential to the fighting efficiency of our allies as well as our own military forces, and has been required to maintain colossal industrial productivity here and in other allied countries. Modern war demands enormous food production, not only for consumption by huge forces on land and sea, but for consumption by the personnel employed in war industries, in transport, and in related occupations.’67 The United States’ ability to fill this need for food gave it a hold over its allies and an advantage over its enemies. When America ended the war with a bumper harvest in 1945 the administration was to discover that the ability to command plentiful quantities of food continued to equate with power in the post-war world.
5
Feeding Britain
Wartime farming was not … as productive as it is today. Feeding stuffs for cattle were rationed and the techniques for making good quality hay and silage were still in their most rudimentary stages. There were shortages of fertilisers and none of the sprays which now keep weeds out of most of our crops. A yield of one ton an acre of all grain was quite good.
(John Cherrington, a farmer in Hampshire during the war)1
Britain entered the war as the combatant nation most dependent on wheat imports. But the Ministry of Agriculture’s campaign to restructure farming and switch to growing wheat and potatoes was so successful that the government never had to ration bread. Many historians have celebrated the government-initiated ploughing-up campaign as a resounding success. It is portrayed as having taken British farming out of a depressed phase of low input, low productivity pastoral farming and, with the introduction of technological innovations, to have reoriented British farms towards much more productive arable farming. In The People’s War Angus Calder argued that the campaign returned British agriculture to its mid-Victorian hey-day before the new global economy in food developed and Britain began to import cheap grains from abroad.2 Certainly, farmers were the social group that benefited the most from the war. The generous pricing scheme which the government introduced meant that between 1939 and 1945 farm incomes quadrupled. Even farm labourers benefited as their wages doubled.3 Consumers were protected from these rising costs by subsidies which kept the price of food in the shops at a reasonable level.4 However, recent research suggests that the agricultural achievements of wartime were less impressive than is usually suggested. Those gains in yields which were achieved were more the straightforward result of an increase in the cultivated area and old-fashioned hard work rather than the by-product of technological innovations.5
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food Page 11
