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Q&A: Should Crop Insurance Be Subsidized? [1]

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Date: 2024-06-28  

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

Shane Hamilton is a historian of American agriculture and agribusiness who teaches at the University of York in the United Kingdom. His two books, Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race and Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy, are intricate histories of the policies and politics of the American food industry, and the transformations they’ve wrought on rural life.

Enjoy our conversation about postwar trucking culture, crop insurance, and English perspectives on the countryside, below.

Photo by Christopher Paul High on Unsplash.

Can you start by telling me who you are – where are you from, what do you do? And are those things related?

I was born and raised in rural southwest Wisconsin, where I attended a high school located in the middle of a 30,000 acre seedcorn field. Most of the previous generations of my family were either dairy farmers or worked in fields closely related to dairy farming. My parents’ generation contended with the wrenching transformation of the rural economy in the second half of the 20th century. Witnessing the struggles my parents faced led me to an acute awareness of the value of education as a means of finding better opportunities outside of agriculture. Perhaps ironically, it was in my academic pursuits at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at MIT that I became increasingly invested in understanding the political and social nature of those very same agricultural transformations that tore me away from my rural roots. And so it has turned out that my personal biography is tightly interwoven with my academic biography; in a way, I have followed the literary dictum to “write what you know.” At the moment, I do so as a Reader (a slightly archaic British-ism for “professor”) of Strategy, Management and Society at the University of York.

You’ve written two books on mid-20th century agricultural history, one about the trucking industry and one about supermarkets. How’d you decide to focus on the industries that cropped up around farming, instead of the act of farming itself?

I think there are three issues that have led me to focus on the history of agribusiness rather than the history of agriculture per se. First, agriculture certainly matters very much to anyone who buys food, however we live in an increasingly urbanized world where the population is geographically and culturally distanced from rural food production sites. By focusing my attention off the farm, to the spaces of distribution and marketing that bring food into urban consumers’ consciousness, I have hoped to make rural and agricultural history relevant to people who might otherwise not think much about it. Second, as I mentioned earlier, my work is very much rooted in my own personal experiences. When I was growing up in rural Wisconsin in the 1970s and 1980s, I witnessed how many farm families came to rely increasingly on off-farm work not only for economic survival but for a sense of purpose and cultural meaning. Even before I watched a movie like Smokey and the Bandit, I knew from personal experience that truck driving was a significant part of rural masculine culture. Third, the more deeply I dove into research in the field, the more I realized that food, agriculture, and rural culture were almost entirely overlooked in business studies – especially in more contemporary times – where scholars of entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy tend to focus on seemingly “hotter” fields such as finance, digital ecosystems, AI, and so on.

Bringing my historical perspective on rural and agricultural issues into the world of business and management studies has provided me with opportunities to fresh and important ideas into a realm of research that, to my satisfaction, has become increasingly interested in agrifood systems and rural society in the past few years. Photo provided by Hamilton.

In a recent paper on crop insurance and finance in agriculture you wrote about rural politicians from both parties scrambling to prop up widely unpopular farm subsidies. Why do rural politicians feel the need to defend policies widely understood to favor large-scale agribusiness? Have the politics around that changed at all since 2014, the year you were writing about?

My paper on financialization argues that crop insurance has been touted as a replacement for farm subsidies since the 1940s. Although originally developed by New Dealers as a form of social insurance – rather more like Social Security for farmers than like automobile insurance – in the latter half of the 20th century crop insurance policies urged farmers to think about risk in actuarial terms, by putting their own “skin in the game” by paying insurance premiums to cover the many hazards posed by pests, weather, and other uncontrollable risks. In theory, an insurance model should shift the costs of mitigating agricultural risk to individual farmers, rather than to taxpayers. In practice, the US crop insurance program is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, although farmers really do put a lot of “skin in the game.” However, it is not at all clear that the crop insurance policies disproportionately favor large-scale agribusiness, and indeed nearly all of the political rhetoric around crop insurance is routinely (and generally sincerely) framed around a narrative of saving the “family farm.” Indeed, I would say that rather than either crop insurance or farm subsidies, the main government policies that have supported the interests of large-scale agribusiness in the 20th and 21st centuries have been those I explore in my books Trucking Country and Supermarket USA – where I focus on the significant government investments in the scientific and technological infrastructure, as well as limited regulatory oversight, that have enabled the rise of industrialized agriculture in the past century. Those large-scale structural issues have certainly not fundamentally changed since 2014. As for the politics of crop insurance, basically the policies have become increasingly complicated and increasingly tailored to a variety of different farmers’ needs, including those of small-scale and specialty crop growers. But there has been, to my knowledge, no fundamental questioning of whether a heavily taxpayer-subsidized insurance model is an appropriate means of addressing the very real risks of contemporary agricultural production.

I know you live and work in the U.K. these days. Has that given you any new perspective on rural American policy and politics?

Two things stand out for me. One is that “rural” means something entirely different in the UK than it does in the US; here it tends to either evoke a rather wealthy landowner who drives a Range Rover and wears Barbour jackets, or, as detailed in a fascinating book by Rebecca Smith – Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside – the often invisible workforce of publicans, foresters, and builders who maintain a curated countryside for tourists. In other words, “rural” does not routinely equate with “farmer” in the UK in the same way that it usually does in the US – and I’ve talked to plenty of farmers here who feel acutely that their interests are rarely taken very seriously by either the wider public or by policymakers. Second, and relatedly, I am very curious to watch the current direction of UK farm policy post-Brexit, which is increasingly seeking to replace EU-style subsidies for agricultural production with investments in sustainability and aesthetics in the countryside. While many farmers feel betrayed, many others see opportunities for transforming their relationship to the land. What the outcome of this policy experiment will be is difficult to predict, but it surely is a world away from the productivist focus of US agricultural policy.

What are you working on now?

I am employed in a business school to teach and research strategy, so most of the project I am currently working on explore the strategies and entrepreneurial behaviors of large-scale agribusinesses, such as an article I recently published that explores the “paradoxes” of agrifood sustainability standards. A very different piece is my recent presidential address for the Agricultural History Society, which explores the history of farm management by riffing off the fact that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, at least one formal definition of “management” is that it is equivalent to bull… shall we say… manure. Several other pieces are currently under review so I shouldn’t mention them, however I have also taken on a role as the research cluster lead for Transformative Food Systems at the University of York, in which capacity I hope to build networks of researchers from across multiple disciplines (including history!) to address some of the grand challenges in food and agriculture that we face today.

This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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