American Dreams, Rural Realities: Family Farms in CrisisPaperback, 1 February 1993

Using Dodge County, Georgia, as a case study, Peggy Bartlett examines the fate of family farming in the United States. She finds the institution remarkably resilient in spite of the farm crisis of the 1980s, at the same time revealing consumerism, individualism, and short-term decision making as the greatest threats to the family farm.

Bartlett's study confirms that falling prices and droughts created financial chaos, but an ambitious, risk-oriented farm management style was most often responsible for driving farms out of business. She explores the nineteenth-century origins and current influence of this entrepreneurial ethos and shows that medium scale farms proved as enduring as the large ones, whose advantages did not always protect them from disaster.

She also looks closely at the concerns of farm women and their sometimes ambivalent relationship to the land. While her research does not expose the "disappearing middle" forecasted by agricultural experts, it does cast doubt on the family farm's future at a time when the American dream is increasingly defined by the possessions characteristic of an urban lifestyle.