Modernism and the Machine Farmer

In this paper I apply recent theoretical discussions of the spatial character of modernity to a ‘rural’ context. I argue that neither modernity nor ‘modernism’ has been an exclusively ‘urban’ phenomenon in the twentieth century, and that attention to modernism in the countryside yields insights into the modernist project. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the apparently ‘rural’ spaces of the prairie west were already integrated into modern trans‐local structures. Wheat farmers were ahead of their contemporaries in their appreciation of the nature and scale of modern distanciated relationships. They were ‘modernist’ in embracing and celebrating the technologies, particularly organizational technologies, for dominating space and time. They were also innovators in modern organizational design, seeking creatively to control the modern “machine” and to bridge the local and the ‘global.’ Their progressive experimentation culminated in a surprising proposal for ‘co‐operative farms’ not unlike Soviet collective farms.