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Accepted Paper:
Oral narratives and the history of agrichemical use in rural America
Heather Roller
(Colgate University)
This paper examines some of the social factors driving agrichemical use over the past half century, drawing connections between archival sources and a set of oral history interviews conducted in New York, Iowa, and California.
Paper long abstract:
Agricultural chemicals leave some immediately visible effects—yellowed foliage, a pest-free crop—but become harder to detect as they move through soils, waterways, and bodies. We know even less about how these substances have permeated rural communities. Over time, they have filtered into family histories, affected relationships between neighbors, and shaped ideas about what farms should look like and what makes a “good farmer.” This paper examines these social histories of chemical use from the 1970s to the present. To do so, it makes connections between archival sources and a series of oral history interviews conducted with conventional farmers, organic farmers, pest control advisors, and people living or working in proximity to agriculture. The paper weaves together stories from three very different agricultural contexts: (1) the high-value specialty croplands of the Sacramento Valley in northern California, a state that applies more agrichemicals than any other but that also has the most stringent environmental regulations on the books; (2) the large-scale commodity croplands of Iowa, where herbicides were applied to 96% of the corn acres and 99% of the soybean acres in 2021; and (3) the less intensively farmed landscape of Central New York, once home to a much larger dairy industry but currently experiencing a long economic decline with rewilding on marginal lands. The interviews highlight the embeddedness of agrichemicals in rural life histories, as well as the shifting social contexts (in addition to the standard economic ones) in which farmers make decisions about agrichemical use.