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The rural village typical of many countries in Europe and Asia - a collection of homes, dose together, occupied by the people who work on the surrounding lands - is virtually unknown in 2Oth-century America. In the United States, instead, each farm family usually lives separately on its own fields, often beyond the sight of its neighbors. The village or town is predominantly a place where the farm family travels to buy supplies, to attend church, and to go for entertain¬ment or political, social or business meetings. In most such areas, special buses pick up children every day to take them to the schools which are usually in the town.
When the early settlers first came to America they followed the old European pattern. In New England, they lived in a cluster of houses around a central green where the cattle of the whole village grazed. The farmer\'s croplands ex-tended outward around the village.
Southward, in the State of Virginia, however, farmers scattered up and down the creeks and rivers, with great distances between families. These settlers were planting a New World crop, tobacco, which required fresh land every few years. This forced the tobacco farmers to move west-ward, as separate families, whenever the land became ex¬hausted. When, after several generations, families reached the low hills at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains and the long valleys enclosed by the mountains, they changed their farming from tobacco to grain and livestock. With these new crops which did not exhaust the soil, people had no further need to move. However, the tradition of the inde¬pendent, separate farm was very strong, and there were no desires to adopt a village type of organization.
Much the same thing had been happening in other eastern states, but for different reasons. In the western reaches of Maryland and New York, wealthy landowners held great blocks of uncultivated land. Frontier farmers who traveled to these areas to dear and farm them without any legal right to the land, naturally did not wish to call attention to them¬selves by establishing villages. Many other families in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York lived on separate homesteads because they came from different countries or held different religious beliefs from their neighbors.
In any case, it was the most independent and self-reliant families who were the first to push westward to the Ap¬palachian Mountains, then southward along the mountain valleys, then into the great Central Basin, and finally west-ward beyond the Rockies. These were the people who set the pattern of the separate farmstead.
Until the days of good roads and automobiles, farming in the United States was a hard and lonely life. To be successful, the farmer and his wife had to develop a variety of skills. Whenever a problem arose, they usually had to deal with it themselves. There were times, of course, when neighbors helped each other with big jobs like building barns but, in day-to-day work, the farmer had to be his own mechanic and was often even his own inventor.
This tradition of the individual farm family was further reinforced by government policy. For many years, beginning in 1862, the government gave land away free. To take full possession of that land, a settler and his family had to clear it, build a house and live there for at least five years.
Between 1890 and the early 1930s, there was an increase in the number of tenant farmers. To reverse this development and to help farmers keep their holdings, the national and state governments provided bans in times of drought or crop failure. Many tenant farmers have also been helped to buy land of their own.
As a result of this combination of tradition and policy, there are not many farms which are owned by absentee landowners. In the United States, only about two to three per cent of all farms are operated by hired managers and only slightly more than one-fourth of all farm labor is done by full-time hired workers or by transient farm labor.
The frontier settlers took with them into the Central Basin many different agricultural traditions which influenced the methods brought over by the original English settlers. The Swedes introduced the log cabin, which became the typical dwelling of the frontier wherever there were trees. The Dutch brought new breeds of farm animals and skills in dairying. The Scots and Irish brought potato cultivation, for although this was a New World crop, it was first widely planted in Europe. What became the typical American barn was actually first created by Germans. Even today, this process of borrowing continues. Two pasture plants, lespedeza and kudzu, have been brought to the United States from Asia. The soybean, another Asian plant, has become one of the chief crops in the Corn Belt. Italians and Japanese have influenced fruit and vegetable growing. Scandinavians have played a large role in dairying and cheesemaking in the great northern dairy region of the Central Basin.
Until rather recently, most of the farmers in the Central Basin practiced ,,general farming", that is, the family produced as much of its own food and equipment as possible, and sold whatever remained to buy things it could not raise or make.
Today, however, nearly all the farm families in the Central Basin do ,,commercial farming": they raise products for sale and do not generally try to produce crops to be self-sufficient. This change from general farming to commercial farming represents another kind of agricultural revolution typified by a decline in the number of farm families concurrent with an increase in the size of farms.
As a result of the growing use of sophisticated farm machinery and advances in the development of fertilizers and in the breeding of animals and crops, the average size of farms in the United States increased from 60 hectares in 1920 to 155 hectares in 1973. A century ago, two-thirds of the American people lived on farms. In 1920, as many as 32 million, or 30 per cent, of the population were farmers. In 1960, farmers and their families numbered 15 million, or about eight per cent. By 1980 the farm population had fallen to 6,241,000.
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