"Harvesting Credit: U.S. Farmers and Farm Credit Administration Mortgage Policy, 1916–1937"

U.S. historians, including Deborah Fitzgerald, Shane Hamilton, and Sarah Phillips have argued federal agrarian farm policies in the 1920-30s shaped the formation of industrialized agribusiness through infrastructure networks, the logic of the industrial ideal, and natural resource programs. However, current scholarship has not adequately discussed the influence of cooperative self-help federal credit programs on agribusiness and state development. Nor do scholars investigate the lived experience of self-employed individuals traversing agricultural finance policies. Therefore, my works seeks to answer the question: What are the ways cooperative self-help federal government credit policies shaped the self-employment of farmers and the emergence of industrialized agribusiness? My project will provide a history of how farmers in the 1920-30s on the federal and state level interacted with and navigated the 1916 Farm Credit Loan Act and later the Farm Credit Administration by focusing on mortgage recipients in the Midwest and South. Through exploring loan appraisal records and farmers personal papers from the U.S. National Archives and the Wisconsin State Historical Society, this research will shed light on how liberal credit policies furthered the financial inequities in agricultural self-employment and shaped the cooperative financing of landownership, production, and employment within U.S. agribusiness. I will argue two groups redefined the category of the deserving farmer in U.S. federal farm credit policy through the implementation of cooperative credit programs: government administrators and landowners. Ultimately, the redefinition benefited low credit risk landowners rather than the agriculturists for whom the policy set out to aid. The recipients of federal cooperative loans ended up shaping the future of agricultural production and landownership in the United States.