Rural Electrification is Still Needed.

Rural Farmers in India, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/india-s-rural-crisis-slowed-farm-growth-may-hurt-7-5-gdp-dream/story-OfW6MAu0VBPKW90nkmTQ2N.html 

           Taking time to research the Rural Electrification Administration has been eye-opening. I had no idea how much farming was changed with the expansion of electricity to rural areas. It changed the lives of the people who lived in rural communities, but it also changed the productivity of each farmer. Technology continues to transform agriculture in ways that are increasingly important. With a growing planet, efficient agriculture is the only way we will be able to continue providing food for increasing populations.

            The quality of life was drastically different from the American people living in cities versus the people living on farms. Farmers couldn’t see their crops or animals after the sun set, without using fire. Women had significantly shorter life spans due to their impossibly hard lives. Washing clothes by hand, building fires during the hot summer months, and other relentless chores were made much simpler and for the first time, people started having free time. With more free time, women had more time to start thinking about things outside of the home, and more women attended college and worked outside of the home. Children, who once had to stop attending school to help on the farm, were allowed to stay in school.

            As I read through articles that showed the hope and excitement electricity brought to rural communities, I kept thinking of the many places in the world that still don’t have electricity. In these places, the women still have shorter life spans. Oftentimes children have to help on farm and are therefore unable to complete school. According to Inder et all, the adults on rural farms cannot produce enough on their own, so the children are needed on the farm and kept from school.

            So, what now? We need to continue to advocate to bring electricity, clean water, and technology to rural communities. Just because 99% of people living in the United States have access to electricity, doesn’t mean the fight to get electricity to rural farmers is over. We need to pay fair prices for small farmers, so these people can afford to continue farming and taking care of their families. By bringing electricity to people living in rural areas, such as India, we will be able to decrease poverty and improve living conditions.

            And of course, just as farms in the United States are now producing more, these rural areas in third world countries will continue to increase their capacity. The Rural Electrification Administration changed farming in the United States, and similar policies can continue to change farming in the world.

References

Haq, Z and Choudhury, G. (2015). "India’s rural crisis, slowed farm growth may hurt 7.5% GDP dream." hindustantimes. Retrieved from https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/india-s-rural-crisis-slowed-farm-growth-may-hurt-7-5-gdp-dream/story-OfW6MAu0VBPKW90nkmTQ2N.html.

Inder, B., Kabore, C., Nolan, S., Cornwell, K., Contreras Suarez, D., Crawford, A., & Kamara, J. K. (2017). Livelihoods andChild Welfare among Poor Rural Farmers in East Africa. African Development Review, 29(2), 169-183. doi:10.1111/1467-8268.12248

Cooperatives and the REA

Delta-Montrose Rural Powerline Association linemen

http://www.dmea.com/content/co-op-history

During the 1930’s, unemployment was high, at times over 20%. President Franklin Roosevelt made a lot of Executive Orders during his time as President to try to help the United States of America climb out of the worst depression it had encountered. On May 11, 1935, Executive Order No. 7037, was signed to establish the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). (Mayberry, 2010). This promised not only the creation of jobs, but electricity to the 90% of rural Americans who, so far, had been left in the dark.

As we know from my earlier posts, the REA was extremely successful, and life-changing for millions of Americans. But enforcing the Executive order didn’t quite go as planned.

The REA was set up to give loans to utility companies so they could extend their services to the rural areas. The utility companies had little interest in taking such a risk: they weren’t sure the investment would be worth it. These rural areas were spread hundreds of miles apart, which meant bringing electricity to each rural home was exponentially more expensive than bringing electricity to homes within the city. For a few months, it looked like the REA would be a failure.

It wasn’t. Applications to apply for REA loans came instead from farmer-based cooperatives. The farmers were willing to take the risk because they knew how much electricity would change their lives. According to “The Electric Cooperative Story,” (n.d.), two years after Roosevelt’s Executive Order that established the REA, the REA drafted the Electric Cooperative Corporation Act, to ensure that these consumer-owned cooperatives could operate and be approved for the REA loans.

It didn’t take long for the cooperatives to build lines that brought electricity to farms across the United States. By 1953, more than 90% of rural Americans had power through electricity, and today over 99% of farms have service. (The Electric Cooperative Story, n.d.). Most of the farms today without electricity abstain by choice.

Even though the process of bringing electricity to Rural farms was different than initially planned, it is likely that the farm-based cooperatives strengthened communities and brought more appreciation for electric service, since it was the farmers themselves who had to work to ensure the power lines reached them.

References

Mayberry, A. (2010). Utility Co-op Connection. Rural Cooperatives, 77(2), 11-23.

The Electric Cooperative Story. (n.d.) America’s Electric Cooperatives. Retrieved from https://www.electric.coop/our-organization/history/.

Folklore of the Rural Electrification Administration through Oral Histories

Pictured above are employees at the early RECC office in Divernon. The cooperative moved to a new building near Auburn in 1954, which is Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative headquarters today.

While the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) undoubtedly changed the lives of many American farmers, not everyone viewed the changes as completely good. The academic sources and propaganda from the time focused solely on the positive aspects of Rural Electrification, it didn’t take long to find a that many oral histories show that people also experienced a sense of loss in the way life was before electricity completely changed their lives. In this way, we can see that folklore is important to a holistic study of any historical event, because it can offer another view of how these changes impacted people.

In the 1980’s, in celebration of the 50-year anniversary of the REA, the North Carolina Association of Electric Cooperatives gathered oral histories of people who lived through the great changes that happened with Rural Electrification in the 1930’s. One woman who was interviewed during that time was Mrs. W. D. Elliott. (Southern Oral History Program). Mrs. Elliott was born in 1911 and got electricity in her home in Chowan County, North Carolina in 1946. I was drawn to this woman’s history in particular because these changes happened when she was 35, which is the age I am now.

Mrs. Elliott says that while having electricity helped lessen the workload for her husband on the farm, and her in the house, it also took away some of the connections she was used to. People tended to stay home more in the evenings listening to the radio (and then the T.V.) instead of visiting with neighbors. She said that her husband preferred to listen to his programs instead of talk with her. Her children were mostly raised with electricity and she said it was hard for her to realize that they didn’t enjoy reading as much as she did, and she blamed it on T.V. This also caused there to be a generational divide.

Folklore, such as oral histories are a way for us to understand a certain aspect of an event that we might night get looking only at published papers or academic journals that focus on the facts and numbers. They tell us how people were impacted, and in this case, they are told from someone who is remembering an event 50 years ago, so it is likely remembered with a lens that includes their more current lives and experiences. As McNeil states in Farm: A Multimodal Reader, studying folklore, “is a great way to understand what’s important to a culture or group.” (Kinkead, Funda, & McNeil, 2016). History is made up of everyone, not just the famous people.

References

Interview with Elliott, Mrs. W. D. by Larry Johnson (date unknown), in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Kinkead, Joyce, Evelyn Funda, and Lynn S. McNeill. Farm: A multimodal reader. Southlake Texas, Fountainhead Press, 2016.