Reflections on One Hundred and Fifty Years of the United States Department of Agriculture

SARAH T. PHILLIPS is an associate professor of history at Boston University, where she teaches courses in American and environmental history. She is the author of This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (2007) and is at work on a project about the politics of the agricultural surplus from the 1940s to the 1980s currently titled “The Price of Plenty: From Farm to Food Politics in Postwar America.”

DALE POTTS received his PhD in history from the University of Maine in 2007. From 2009 through 2010, he was a research associate at Colby College. At present, he is an assistant professor at South Dakota State University, where he teaches courses in United States, world, American Indian, and environmental history. His publications include a chapter on Maine Native peoples in the anthology A Landscape History of New England (2011) and an article on Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (Autumn 2011).

ADRIENNE PETTY is an assistant professor of history at the City College of New York. Her first book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War, will be available in September 2013.

MARK SCHULTZ is a professor of history at Lewis University and author of The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (2005). Schultz and Petty received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for “Breaking New Ground: A History of African American Farm Owners after the Civil War.” The project generated hundreds of interviews, which are archived at the Southern Oral History Collection at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

SAM STALCUP worked as a historian at the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) from 2006 to 2012. He is currently completing a dissertation on the history of soil conservation in the United States at the University of Oklahoma.

ANNE EFFLAND received her PhD in agricultural history and rural studies from Iowa State University in 1991 and has been a research historian and social scientist with the Economic Research Service at the USDA since 1990. Her current work at the USDA focuses primarily on domestic agricultural support policies, especially their intersection with international issues, and she has represented the United States as a policy expert in a number of international venues. Her historical research has ranged widely and appeared previously in Agricultural History. She is a fellow of the Agricultural History Society and served as its president from 2008 to 2009.