Farming the Cutover - Hardcover

by Robert Gough (Author)

After northern Wisconsin was cleared by commercial loggers early in the twentieth century, enthusiastic promoters and optimistic settlers envisioned transforming this "cutover" into a land of yeoman farmers. Here thousands of families--mostly immigrants or second-generation Americans--sought to recreate old worlds and build new farms on land that would come to be considered agriculturally worthless. In the end, they succumbed not to drought or soil depletion but to social and political pressures from those who looked askance at their way of life.

Back Jacket

Farming the Cutover describes the visions and accomplishments of these settlers from their perspective. People of the cutover managed to forge lives relatively independent of market pressures, and for this they were characterized as backward by outsiders and their part of the state was seen as a hideout for organized crime figures. State and federal planners, county agents, and agriculture professors eventually determined that the cutover could be engineered by professional and academic expertise into a Progressive social model and the lives of its inhabitants improved. By 1940, they had begun to implement public policies that discouraged farming, and they eventually decided that the region should be depopulated and the forests replanted. By exploring the history of an eighteen-county region, Robert Gough illustrates the travails of farming in marginal areas. He juxtaposes the social history of the farmers with the opinions and programs of the experts who sought to improve the region. Significantly, what occurred in the Wisconsin cutover anticipated the sweeping changes that transformed American agriculture after World War II.