Skilled and Unskilled
One of the underlying assumptions of hired farm labor is that it’s primarily physical and unskilled, somewhat like that performed by the migrant farmworker pictured here on the Gibson Farm in Wayland, NY. Ironically, though, 19th-century farmers in the Genesee valley were telling themselves that they “must no longer work with the hands only, but with the head also” (Powers). Why then would a farmer want to hire supposedly unskilled workers?
After all, there were repeated dire warnings of what would happen if important agricultural tasks were left to “careless or incompetent hands” (“What” 188). When transplanting tomatoes, a farmer shouldn’t “trust their removal to careless hands”; an axe could be used in the orchard, “but then let none but dexterous hands touch it”; all sheep “must be shorn by good hands, who do not get angry and handle them roughly while shearing them” (W.C.P; “Trimming” 35; Nicholas). Without a farmer’s constant supervision of unskilled labor, one writer predicted that total disaster could follow: “While he is studying [organic chemist Justus von] Leibig, his men will be taking a siesta in the hay field. Careless hands will soon break his improved implements. He may think to economize food by cooking it, but without constant surveillance his men will waste more in a day than he can save in a week. They will take pleasure in thwarting all his pet plans, and will harass and perplex him in every conceivable way” (“Walks”).
Apparently only farmers possessed both hands and head when it came to skilled work. There’s no reason this should have been inevitable, since during wheat harvesting “hands unskilled in the use of the rake” could “acquire the art,” and there were proposals for creating a Genesee Agricultural College as early as 1845 (“McCormick’s”; Agricola). At the 1841 convention of the Monroe Agricultural Society, a locally known orator named E. Darwin Smith perceptively explained that “in the countries of the old world the farmer is a tenant or a serf—subject to the capriciousness of some arrogant nobleman,” and treating “the laborer as though he were an inferior” had persisted in America.
The common thread was land ownership: thanks to appropriation of indigenous territories more American farmers owned land than in Europe, but at any scale larger than family-sized they were dependent upon hired hands. “We want our farmers to be working-men, not day-laborers,” proclaimed The Genesee Farmer, although farmers still wanted day-laborers (“Glorying” 274). Workers characterized as barely competent could be paid lower wages. The distinction between skilled and unskilled was in part performative—we have come to call it The Farmer’s Complaint—and in part a strategic division of labor, agricultural technologies, and scientific knowledge. Those barriers have continued to divide farmers and their migrant farmworkers, regardless of a worker’s capabilities.
Works Consulted
-- Agricola. “Genesee Agricultural College.” The Genesee Farmer 6.12 (Dec. 1845): 187.
-- “Glorying in the Goad.” The Genesee Farmer 25.9 (Sept. 1864): 273-275.
-- “McCormick’s Reaping Machine.” The Genesee Farmer 5.9 (Sept. 1844): 76-77.
--Nicholas, D.A.A. “On the Management of Sheep.” The Genesee Farmer 18.3 (Mar. 1857): 80.
-- Powers, S. “The Increasing Necessity for Making Farming a Science.” The Genesee Farmer 20.9 (Sept. 1859): 276.
-- Smith, E. Darwin. “Address Delivered Before the Monroe Co. Agricultural Society.” The Genesee Farmer 2.10 (Oct. 1841): 170-172.
-- “Trimming Orchards.” The Genesee Farmer 2.2 (Feb. 1841): 34-35.
-- W.C.P. “Cultivation of Tomatoes.” The Genesee Farmer 19.3 (Mar. 1858): 92
-- “Walks and Talks on the Farm.” The Genesee Farmer 25.11 (Nov. 1864): 329
-- “What is the Cause of the Failure of So Many Trees Sent Out by Nurserymen?” The Genesee Farmer 19.6 (June 1858): 187-189