Farmhand

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FARMHAND

FARMHAND, a term prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the northern United States, referred to farm wageworkers and generally was equivalent to "hired man." Now, however, the more common designation is "agricultural worker," which includes all who labor on the land manually regardless of region, structure of enterprise, or status.

Early in colonial America, distinctive patterns among agricultural workers emerged. Landowners who wanted workers to help them paid the passage from the British Isles and western Europe for indentured servants, bound on arrival to serve for several years. Upon conclusion of this apprenticeship, servants "out of their time" ascended the agricultural ladder by settling as farmers on land of their own. Indenture, which brought an estimated half of the whites who came to colonial America, faded out by the 1830s. Waves of free immigrants also seeking land of their own, available until World War I, soon followed.

A disadvantage of indentured servitude from the master's viewpoint was the replacement cost of rapid labor turnover. Many grasped at the alternative offered early in the seventeenth century by slavery, which spread mainly southward from Virginia. The imposition of lifelong bondage eliminated workforce turnover and stimulated the spread of plantation agriculture. Prior to the American Revolution, a few Indians became enslaved, but slave laborers were of preponderantly African origin. African Americans numbered 700,000 by 1790 and 4 million by 1860. In the South, masters numbered one-thirtieth of the total population, whereas slaves numbered one-third of it. In 1860 one-quarter of all slaves in the American south were in holdings of less than ten, one-half in holdings between ten and fifty, and one-quarter in holdings of more than fifty.

Following emancipation in 1865, sharecropping, a system that remunerated laborers with a share of the crop, largely replaced slavery. At their peak in 1930, sharecroppers' farms numbered 750,000. By 1964, overwhelmed by mechanization, they had fallen to 112,000. As the decline continued, the 1969 census ceased separate tabulation.

Hired wageworkers, of which there were very few in the South prior to emancipation, date from earliest colonial times in the North. They served either seasonally or year-round. If the latter, they typically received room and board and cash and lived with the farmer's family. Competing opportunities to settle on western land or to enter fishing and shipping industries kept the numbers of wageworkers low and encouraged the exchange of labor

between farmers and labor by the farmer's own family. By 1870 agricultural laborers and farmers were approximately equal in number: 2.9 million and 3 million, respectively. Thirteen percent of the former and 0.8 percent of the latter were women. After increasing in the early twentieth century, the numbers of each fell rapidly from 1940 on, until by 1970 laborers numbered only 1.6 or 1.1 million and farmers only 2.4 or 1.7 million, as reported by the Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, respectively. Of these, 24 and 3.7 percent, respectively, were women. Some 19 percent of the laborers and 0.8 percent of the farmers were below twenty years of age. By 1997 hired agricultural laborers accounted for less than 1 percent of the American workforce; about 17 percent of those workers were women. The era of the hired man closed shortly after World War I, with the decline in availability of cheap land and the growing mechanization of agriculture.

Over the second half of the twentieth century, the number of hired workers residing on farms fell dramatically. Advances in mechanization and technology had given an advantage to large-scale agribusiness and put thousands of small family farms out of business. Large-scale corporate farms needed abundant supplies of laborers only at harvest time. In the 1930s drought, depression, and mechanization dislodged large numbers of farmworkers from their homes to follow the crops for a living. During the Dust Bowl disaster that hit parts of Oklahoma and Texas in the 1930s, many sought better soil and higher wages in California. Some labeled them "Okies," a term that has since entered American lore through the photographs of Dorothea Lange and John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

The growing separation between employer and employed on farms engendered attempts at forming trade unions among agricultural wageworkers. Such efforts, which date from before World War I, gained footholds against great odds, mainly in the 1960s. Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union, using civil protest techniques learned from the black civil rights movement, gained significant concessions from agribusinesses in California and the Southwest.

Formal importation of Mexicans, a major source of the specialty-crop seasonal workers from outside the United States, ended in 1965. By 2002 nearly 10 percent of farmworkers were migratory, up from 8 percent in 1970. Migrant agricultural laborers in the United States face especially difficult working and living conditions. The abundant supply of immigrant laborers, combined with linguistic and cultural barriers, keeps wages artificially low. The workers' ambiguous residency status often

prevents them from taking advantage of basic health and education services. The number of agricultural workers of all classes reached a peak of 13.6 million in 1916. By 1950 the total had fallen to 9.9 million, by 1969 to 4 million, and by 2002 to just over 1 million. Full-time hired farm workers are more likely than other American wage earners to be young, single, male, and Latino. More than half have never finished high school, and over one-third are not citizens of the United States. By 2000 there was a wide gap between owners and well-paid machine operators, on the one hand, and poorly paid illegal aliens and recent immigrants on the other.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garcia, Matt. A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Griffith, David Craig, et al. Working Poor: Farmworkers in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery and Servitude in North America: A Short History. Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2001.

Murphy, Arthur D., Colleen Blanchard, and Jennifer A. Hill, eds. Latino Workers in the Contemporary South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

Steinfeld, Robert J. The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Whayne, Jeannie M. A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.

Paul S.Taylor/a. r.