Description: Honoring Wayne D. Rasmussen, "Mr. Agricultural History" at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and throughout the nation, this book comprises essays (some with comments) by distinguished authors from varied disciplines on the past achievements, current status, and future challenges of agricultural history. Specific topics include the development of agricultural history in the United States, new concepts to be explored, the perspectives of rural and social history; the agricultural Midwest in 1860, changes in southern farming during the twentieth century; farming as a business, agricultural technology; and the roles of women in farming. The book concludes with a brief biography of Wayne D. Rasmussen and a bibliography of his writings. Rasmussen, the grand old man of U.S. farm history; arrived in Washington in 1937 where his history degree was good for a clerk-typist job in the USDA. From the Agriculture Department, Rasmussen witnessed and documented the development of modern agriculture as the nation's largest and most efficient industry. The six million farms operating when he left the high plains of Montana have dwindled to just over two million, with most of what Americans eat coming from roughly 650,000 of those farms. As the nation's foremost agricultural historian and blessed with "a memory big as a silo", Rasmussen has gently reminded eleven secretaries of agriculture that "the only constant about agriculture is that it's cyclical". His influence as "keeper of the agricultural keys" and simply as an exceptional scholar is amply demonstrated by this book.

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