Farm to Table Reading: Industrial Agriculture and Media Materiality in the Twentieth Century

Following a period of profligate pulpwood logging that threatened domestic forest resources, a 1911 change in North American tariff policy made Canadian newsprint a duty-free import to the United States. While this gave newspaper publishers subsidized access to plentiful paper supplies, it also generated fears that the functioning of the American press was now dependent on a commodity produced in a foreign country. As part of a nationalist mood in the US in the 1920s, some sought to find new sources of domestic raw materials from which to manufacture paper, and Midwestern cornstalks were among the most promising options. By the late 1920s, the United States Department of Agriculture and private firms had proven the concept that corn paper was a practically viable alternative to imported Canadian wood paper, and a series of Midwestern newspapers did demonstration printings of editions meant to model what they believed to be both the future of newspaper publishing and the future of farming. The successful demonstrations were meant to show resource sovereignty over the material basis of public life and to assert that US newspapers could thrive using domestic resources. It was possible, many believed, to have farm to table reading in the heartland.