Managing the Farm

“Management” is routinely understood by agricultural historians as an exercise in rational expertise, targeted at driving ever more efficient, “businesslike” practices on the farm. However, insights from critical management studies suggest that farm management, as a body of theory and as a form of practice, may be grounded in something less savory than epistemological superiority or the ability to improve farming practice. This article explores how the meaning of farm management changed substantially over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from a pragmatic approach for empowering individual farmers to a more abstract set of theories offering a chimera of control.