ABSTRACT
Agriculture is a human activity aimed at producing useable food and fiber goods from land-based renewable natural resources. It is in some respects the quintessential productive enterprise of the human species. The rise of industrial manufacturing and the accompanying growth in applied science is the key event in the emergence of the productionist pattern. This chapter illustrates how farmers such as those that occupied the North American heartland during the nineteenth century might have come to adopt a productionist view of their farming activity. Productionism is a joint construction drawing on the virtue of industry and the doctrine of grace, supported and behaviorally reinforced by the overlapping structure in institutions and incentives under capitalism. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism documents the importance of industry or hard work in the moral psychology of the Protestant working class that emerged during the era of European expansion.
