Volume 18 , Issue 25

Walking With Sweet Silly Sadie

This week NW Okie is continuing her research on the "Dust Bowl" era with the dreaded "suitcase farmers" who came from the big cities; bought land, hiring tenant farmers to plow up the buffalo grass to plant wheat during the war.

The definition of suitcase farmer: a grower of wheat or other crops who lives outside the community except during the plowing, seeding, and harvesting seasons, often has a farm without buildings, and does much of the farming by hired custom operators.



The term "sidewalk farmers" refers to individuals who live in urban areas and drive to the country to care for their crops and livestock. In 1935 the federal census of agriculture recorded 213,325 Oklahoma farms, but by 1980 there were only 72,000. In the 1997 census, due to a change from the Standard Industrial Classification System (SIC) to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), aligning Canada, Mexico, and United States enumeration categories, the number of farms in Oklahoma increased to 74,214. However, 41,154 of these owners claimed their primary income came from something other than farming. There are thousands of these part-time agriculturalists in the state, and they spend much of their weekend taking care of the family farm.

Less numerous are "suitcase farmers," who reside great distances from their land but tend it a few weeks annually at planting and harvesting time. This type of hobby farming lends itself to wheat, one of Oklahoma's most popular crops. Sidewalk and suitcase farms help many of their owners rekindle a sense of rural identity while enjoying the benefits of waged incomes in urban environments. This often allows families to continue their long relationships with the ancestral farm, which may have been in the family for generations. The fact that city dwellers retained strong agricultural roots was recorded in the census of 1920, when farm population made up half of the state's population.

Suitcase farming was, and to a limited degree still is, carried on by farmers living more than one county away from the land they farm. The term was used as early as 1930 by the county agent for Greeley County, in western Kansas, although its characteristics were not defined. The pattern, or basic ecology, of early suitcase farming can be generalized in this way: Cheap level grazing land in a zone of recurring drought, a moderate distance west of established wheat country that was already largely mechanized, was invaded by farmers with tractors and other farm machinery in a speculative westward advance. The plow-up was so substantial that a suitcase-farming frontier can be recognized that included most of west central and southwestern Kansas and small areas in Colorado.

View more on The Dust Bowl. Would the Dust Bowl happen again? Have we learned our lessons of past mistakes?

Good Night! Good Luck!
  |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

---