Annual Meeting

Illinois Agriculture

It’s no secret, especially to its residents, that Illinois is a divided state. There’s Chicago, and then there’s not Chicago. However, Illinois’ rural farming region should not be overlooked when it comes to appreciating and understanding what makes this state tick. While calling oneself a farmer is as simple as being able to annually produce and sell more than $1,000 of agricultural goods (something my wife’s never-ending herb garden could likely do in most years), the number of farms in and around Chicagoland has increased. Since 2002, Illinois has lost just over 2,000 farms, yet the number of farms in the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area has increased, due in large part to the addition of smaller farms, less than 200 acres in size, that cater to the region’s ever-increasing demand for local, fresh food (more on urban agriculture in an upcoming Newsletter piece).

According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s 2011 National Land Cover Dataset, 70 percent of Illinois’ land cover was classified as either cultivated cropland or pasture/hay (FIGURE 1). The state ranks 7th in the U.S. in total agricultural sales ($17.2 billion), but ranks 3rd when considering only the sale of crops such as corn and soybeans, which in 2012 covered over 95 percent of Illinois’ cropland. Illinois farmers produce between 15 and 20 percent of the U.S. total combined corn/soy crop annually (FIGURE 2). East-central Illinois was the country’s first major cash-grain farming region. Known as the Grand Prairie, this region, prior to Euro-American settlement, was a large grassland/wetland/oak savannah ecosystem. Because of its lack of relief it was poorly drained and largely ignored – except for cattle barons who used the untillable land as pasture – as the state was being settled in the 1800s. As decades passed, and as drainage ditches were dug and clay field tile were installed, the productive capacity of this region’s fertile soil was eventually realized. As these large parcels of pasture were tilled, and because individual landowners could not farm it all themselves, it necessitated the beginning of the now ubiquitous system of renting privately-owned cropland to others; a system by which landowners are paid a per-acre sum by a tenant who maintains the owner’s land. In Illinois, and across much of the rest of the Corn Belt, well over 50 percent of all farmland in most counties is rented.

Figure 1. Illinois Land Cover, 2011.

 

Figure 2. Percent of harvested cropland planted to corn or soybeans, 2012.

 

Most farms in Illinois have grown over the years. Of the state’s 75,000 farms, nearly 8,000 (~10 percent) are 1,000 acres or larger. However, those 8,000 farms maintain over half of all of the state’s farmland. The idea that these big, “corporate” farms are industrializing the agricultural landscape is yarn easily spun to the uninformed, but one that is blatantly incorrect. In 2012 Illinois had 3,716 corporate farms. This seems impressive, especially when the prototypical “family farm” continues to disappear, but 90 percent of these so-called “corporate” farms were, in fact, what the U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to as “family corporations” (FIGURE 3). In other words, they were still family farms. The land was not owned by Cargill, Monsanto, or any of the other large, multinational corporations often blamed for the demise of farming (although such corporations do have considerable influence in modern U.S. agribusiness), but for tax purposes the family had decided to create a business. In reality, only 0.5 percent of Illinois farms are non-family, corporately-owned entities. These non-family, corporate-owned farms work an equally small percentage of the state’s total agricultural land – 0.7 percent. The Illinois “corporate” agricultural landscape mirrors exactly that of the entire United States: 0.5 percent of farms, 0.7 percent of farmland…numbers that have changed little over the past four decades.

Figure 3. The large-scale equipment of a family farm. From left to right: corn-harvesting combine, semi tractor/trailer (in background), and grain cart/tractor.

 

Chicago’s importance in U.S. agricultural production and processing, by and large, has waned over the past half-century. Once the center of our country’s beef (and to a lesser extent pork) processing industry, Chicago, save for a handful of specialty uses for corn-based products (e.g. high fructose corn syrup), sees little of what is produced in much of the rest of the state. If not used locally to produce biofuels or to feed Illinois’ dwindling numbers of livestock (Illinois accounts for only 1.2 percent and 6.6 percent of U.S. cattle and hog sales, respectively), most corn and soybeans are brought from the fields in which they grew to one of the many hundreds of giant, glistening grain elevators that can be found along Illinois’ railroad lines – many of which head south to out-of-state processing facilities or to ports along the Mississippi River where they will continue south for export out of the Gulf of Mexico (FIGURE 4).

Figure 4. Modern grain elevator and storage at Coles Station, between Mattoon and Decatur, IL.

 

Geographer William J. Doolittle said, “Agriculture may well be the most comprehensive of geographical topics. It involves modification of both the biological and physical components of the environment, and it incorporates social and economic components with distinctive spatial manifestations” (Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 82, pp. 386-401). Agriculture and rural areas will be the focus of a number of sessions at the upcoming Chicago meeting. Indeed, many have already begun to take advantage of these topics’ increasing breadth and depth by reporting on – at AAG Annual Meetings – the myriad issues related to our rural and agricultural landscapes (FIGURE 5). We hope you will join us!

Figure 5. Number of rural- and agricultural-themed papers/posters presented at past AAG Annual Meetings.

— Chris Laingen
Eastern Illinois University

DOI: 10.14433/2014.0015

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Chris Laingen
Chris Laingen
New Books for Geographers

New Books: August 2014

Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.

Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).

Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.

August, 2014

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AAG Staff
AAG Staff
President's Column

The More-Than-Conference Conference

Mona Domosh

Courtesy of the Great Lakes Feminist Collective.
Front and back of the postcards distributed by the Great Lakes Feminist Collective at the 2014 AAG conference in Tampa, FL. Courtesy of the Great Lakes Feminist Collective.

I was surprised to see the line snaking around the entrance to the Past President’s Plenary at this year’s AAG conference in Tampa. Of course folks wanted to hear Eric Sheppard’s address, I thought, but honestly the only lines I had seen at the conference ended at a ‘free drinks’ bar. Things became clearer as I approached: there were people standing at the entrance to the room handing out postcards, and so fellow geographers were lining up to get one; not wanting to miss anything I took all three. As it turned out, they made excellent reading material (see figs. 1-6). Each card provided verbal and visual information about aspects of the discipline and the academy in general that the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective found wanting. Just the day before I had attended a session of what is called the subconference where we had talked through related issues facing junior scholars working in the academy: lack of support for social reproduction, increasing use of contingent faculty, the enduring impacts of the great recession, and so on. There were I realized many different confer-ings going on at the conference, all in some way related to it but differing in type and scope.

Almost all conferences exceed what is listed on the program; social interactions among groups of people are never fully scripted. And what is commonly referred to as “the AAG” — a deceptively short and unassuming name for what often exceeds definition — is certainly no exception. Even the full title — the Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers — just doesn’t seem adequate to describe the excitingly and dauntingly large, diverse, social, performative, professional and personal gathering that happens once a year in a large American city. Those of us who have attended “the AAG” know that it is much more than the 5,000 or so papers, posters and plenaries that are presented. There are workshops, field trips, receptions, preconferences, parties, meetings, in-the-hallway-chats, dinners, and drinks that merge our professional and personal lives. And there are “other” events too, those meant to provoke, protest, initiate, and investigate. Given that these activities often take place in the interstitial spaces of the conference and are not visible to everyone, I highlight them here because I believe they are important signs of the liveliness and dynamism of our discipline.

Figure 7. Broadsheets distributed by the Geography Guerilla Girls at the 1996 AAG conference in Charlotte, NC. Courtesy of the Geography Guerilla Girls.
Figure 8. Broadsheets distributed by the Geography Guerilla Girls at the 1996 AAG conference in Charlotte, NC. Courtesy of the Geography Guerilla Girls.

Like most political interventions, the idea of the postcard “drop” (as the Collective calls it) wasn’t born anew. From what I’ve gathered from my own memory and that of fellow geographers (I sent out a message on several listservs that reached about 4,000 geographers, asking for information about “other” activities that have occurred at our conferences; thanks to all of those who responded) there have been several instances in the past when individuals and groups have distributed protest literature. One geographer remembered Bill Bunge handing out anti-nuclear flyers at the door of a plenary session at the Detroit conference in 1985, and no doubt there have been similar interventions since then. The Collective’s website traces the “drop” to the action taken by a group of Canadian feminist geographers at the 2002 AAG conference. The group compiled statistics about the number of women in geography, printed the information on pink sheets, and distributed them throughout the conference, keeping the authorship anonymous. Reactions were mixed, they write, but the act of compiling information that vividly depicts inequities and distributing it widely had multiple effects. Six years before that, a similar intervention occurred at the Charlotte AAG conference, when an anonymous group called the Geography Guerrilla Girls distributed two broadsheets that documented the paltry number of women faculty in geography departments in the United States (see figs. 7, 8). So the Collective’s postcards drew on and were contributing to an interesting historical geography of the politics of Geography. At the same time, another contribution to that historical geography was being enacted in Tampa. Graduate students from the University of North Carolina — inspired they say partly by Antipode and the critical geographic inquiry it represents — had put together a zine on Black Geographies called The Whirlwind that they handed out to geographers attending related sessions on geography and race/racism, an important and lively addition to the discipline’s history of protest literature.

The subconference too draws on an historical geography of the politics of the discipline as geographers have sought alternative ways to gather and discuss issues not usually encountered in the official hallways and meeting rooms. For example, GPOW (Geographic Perspectives on Women specialty group) has organized a reception coincident with the AAG celebrating recently published feminist geography books at a local bookstore each year since 2005, creating alternative spaces for networking and collaboration close to the conference site but not in it. The idea of the subconference has its roots in several sets of discussions held at various venues, and took form for the first time in 2010 at the D.C. conference. Since then it has evolved into a series of sessions listed on the program but organized specifically not to follow the template of ‘regular’ sessions; instead, facilitators lead discussions geared to issues not often addressed (though certainly talked about) formally at conferences: work-life balance, child care, mental health, disabilities, contingent faculty, impacts of the recession, the neoliberalization of the academy. And word is out that about the need for this type of intervention: a group of MLA (Modern Language Association) members organized a subconference at their last meeting (make sure to read down the page to see the nice shout out to the subconference of the AAG!). A similar attempt to open alternative spaces for new types of conversations within the discipline was apparent in a set of sessions geared toward mental health issues, and in past years, a set of sessions on “deaf geographies.”

Figure 9. Photograph of an on-site maze constructed at the AAG conference in Tampa Fl. Courtesy of Lance Howard.

Other complementary sites that revolve around “the AAG” are geared toward opening the conference to different forms of expression. I have memories of past AAG hallways lined with carefully curated photographs, but I can’t seem to find information about who or what organized these exhibitions. In Los Angeles a group of geographers organized an art exhibition called “Curating the Cosmos” that accompanied a series of sessions with the same title, making important interventions into understanding what the geohumanities might look like, while another geographer created an on-site maze as a form of impromptu landscape art (see fig. 9). And for the past three years a group of geographers have coordinated a four-hour map-a-thon mash-up that is held in conjunction with the AAG but at a different site, thus encouraging creative digital cartographic expression and inventing new arenas for networking and community building.

No doubt this is a partial and selective accounting of the many “other” activities that coincide with our annual conference (and I would love to hear about more). I hope that highlighting these few interventions suggests the importance of the more-than-conference aspect of our conference, of the ways that “the AAG” provides a platform for self-critique and creative intervention, and of how these provocations and investigations keep the discipline dynamic and create space for changing its contours. These are signs of the liveliness of our discipline, of people and communities who care enough to prod and poke us. I look forward to hearing about other interventions and experiencing them in Chicago and beyond.

— Mona Domosh

DOI: 10.14433/2014.0014

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