Selected Presentations

In 1979, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) initiated a nationwide boycott of the Campbell's Soup Company aimed at the amelioration of wages and working conditions. For six years, the struggle faced strained negotiations, racial intimidation, and state-sanctioned violence. By February 1986, FLOC negotiated the first agricultural tri-party collective bargaining agreement in the United States. This victory was achieved, in part, through a coalition between growers and laborers. The contracting system for Ohio's tomato production established, as union organizers identified, a chain of exploitation: "Campbell[‘s] eats the growers, the growers eat the workers." Once the boycott began, Campbell's awarded contracts only to operations with mechanical pickers. This placed an immense financial burden onto increasingly cash-strapped and migrant-labor-dependent growers. Campbell’s exploitative position thus resulted in a unique coalition against corporatized agriculture that this study aims to explore. The existing scholarship has overlooked this relationship which fluctuated between confrontation and cooperation. At the boycott's inception, growers often defined laborers as "their Mexicans." By 1991, an unprecedented address by a grower at FLOC's Fifth Constitutional Convention was indicative of change. This evolution demonstrates that despite contemporary hostilities, an alliance is not a fringe possibility but rather a historical precedent.

In August 1938, Jane Kramp was crowned the “Queen of Tomatoland” at the inaugural Wood County Tomato Festival in Bowling Green, Ohio. Kramp had been selected based on the characteristics of "physical appearance and robust health," qualities shared by none other than Wood County tomatoes. United by the region’s million-dollar commodity, northwest Ohioans rallied behind the seemingly endless growth and profitability – and not without good reason. Between 1925 and 1945, acreage dedicated to tomato cultivation ballooned by 114 percent with yields following suit. Additionally, the region housed industrial giants Heinz and Campbell’s who employed local residents and purchased stock from local growers. But prosperity quickly waned. Squeezed out by exploitative corporate contracting and volatile market conditions, by 2007 the region only harvested 8,000 acres. Obscured by stronger regional producers, northwest Ohio's tomato industry has been neglected in historical scholarship. This presentation then seeks to illuminate how the region's production aligns and deviates from established national narratives. Moreover, I will highlight the commodities decline by focusing on the environmental and economic challenges faced by growers throughout the twentieth century. This study, therefore, provides new insights into the complexity and contemporary conceptions of commodity production across the Midwest. 

In 1964, Dr. Bernard B. Fall wrote in the New York Times that, “A grain of rice is worth a drop of blood.” His conclusion: fed communists would be easier to deal with, geopolitically, than “lean revolutionaries in China and North Vietnam.” During the Vietnam War, the United States implemented a similar line of thinking; the modernization of South Vietnam’s agricultural industry would lead to effective counterinsurgency measures among the rural population. This research examines how America’s mechanized and industrialized forms of agriculture were both too complex and too expensive for South Vietnam’s farmers to maintain without continued American aid.