Although I didn't realize it at the time, this study began in the summer of 1995. I was a rising college senior, an aspiring musician, and I had taken a summer job outside my South Georgia hometown harvesting canola to make some quick cash for a trip to Europe. I worked with a local farmer, a genial and soft-spoken man. He was not a farm owner but a farm manager who found freelance jobs here and there. I opened and closed the sacks of seed while he drove the combine. It was not sweaty work: we sat in the comfort of an air-conditioned cab and darted into the June heat only as long as it took to pluck some wayward stalk out of the machine or to gulp down our lunch.

From our conversations I caught my first glimpse of a contemporary agrarian worldview. This was a man who believed that a society depended on its farmers. They produced the food and fiber that yielded national affluence and national security. Farmers embodied the American work ethic, and they represented the operating definition of economic freedom. Unlike welfare recipients, who in his view “had decided not to work,” farms deserved government protection and federal assistance. Had I spent more time in college studying history, I would have immediately recognized the Jeffersonian strains, not to mention the inconsistent definition of government “welfare”; as it was, I could only ponder the puzzle of a farmer who lived in town, worked intermittently for large, subsidized landowners, and yet saw himself as a piece of the country's moral and economic foundation.