Self-Help for Agribusiness: Farm Debt, the Rural US Landscape, and the Federal Credit System, 1898–1987

Nicole Adrian is currently a history doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on how federal U.S. agricultural credit programs and farm debt shaped inequality, the formation of agribusiness, and environmental degradation during the twentieth century. Prior to Penn, Nicole studied history, environmental studies, conservation biology, and public policy at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is a 2025 recipient of Rose Library’s Southern History and Culture Visiting Researcher Fellowship. 

This year I started the archival research for my dissertation entitled, “Self-Help for Agribusiness: Farm Debt, the Rural US Landscape, and the Federal Credit System, 1898–1987.” My research asks how federal agrarian finance programs contributed to the formation of agribusiness and transformed rural land ownership in the process. In 1916, Congress passed the Federal Farm Loan Act to increase the supply of credit to US farmers. The Act represented the first federally financed mortgage policy in the United States. Mimicking the structure of the U.S. federal reserve system, the Act created 12 individual federal cooperative land banks who administered agricultural mortgages to current and prospective farmers across the continental United States and Puerto Rico. This 1916 policy laid the foundation for a long-lasting farm credit system in the United States that persists to the present day. Before the passage of the Act in 1916, farmers in the United States had few options for credit. While visiting the Rose Library I utilized the Jonas Odum Papers, J. Freeman Suttle correspondence, and the Harrold Brothers Papers to explore personal stories relating to agricultural finance before and after 1916.  

Jonas Odum, the son of a domestic African American mother and a wealthy white landowner, owned and operated a 250 farm in Baker County, Georgia during the first half of the twentieth century. His farm produced cotton, peaches, pecans, and a variety of other fruits and vegetables. Before his death in 1954, one of Jonas Odum’s five children, Joel Odum, took out a $5,200 federal land bank loan from the Columbia Land Bank in South Carolina and the Camilla National Farm Loan Association. 

 Part of my research investigates farmers’ relationships with these cooperatively owned banks. Farmers would pay down the initial amount of federal money through their continual purchase of stock in the banks. However, farmers were not able to take out mortgages or buy bonds directly from the land bank. Instead, the system required them to create local farmer cooperatives, called National Farm Loan Associations (NFLAs). Each time a farmer took out a loan through a NFLA, 5-percent of the loan amount went back to the NFLA through the purchase of stock in the cooperative organization. The NFLA then used the money from the farmers to purchase stock from the Federal Land Bank. Therefore, there were multiple layers of cooperative ownership for the bank. The Odum papers provide a comprehensive look into the family’s relationship to these federal loans with a piece of intergenerational agricultural land. 

Moreover, I spent the bulk of my time exploring the Harrold Brother Papers. This is an underutilized collection at the Rose Library. The collection encompasses over 200 years of business transactions for cotton manufacturing and warehouses through the Harrold Brothers enterprises. The documents contain the company’s financial transition in agriculture from New York and local banks to a reliance on government institutions for backing. Some of their documents from the twentieth century detail their relationship with the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) after 1933. The CCC was part of Frank Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to stabilize, protect, and support farm prices. The Harrold Brothers stored cotton in their warehouses to help stabilize the price of cotton bales during the mid-twentieth century.   

 

I am looking forward to incorporating the Harrold Brothers financial transactions over time into my project. They are an example of a company who adapted to the changing agricultural incentives offered to agricultural processors during the turn of the twentieth century. Thank you to the library and reading room staff at the Rose Library for being so helpful and supportive during my visit. Without their support my research would not be possible.