"It was a Long Way from Perfect, but it was Working": The Canning and Home Production Initiatives in Greene County,...

During the early 1940s Greene County, Georgia's, Unified Farm Program, a model undertaking coordinating the efforts of federal, state, and local agencies, attracted national attention, largely through the work of sociologist Arthur Raper. At the core of the program was the effort to raise the standard of living for the county's rural poor through increasing home-farm production and improving diet. The initiative entailed active intervention by Farm Security Administration farm and home supervisors and illustrates the tension between the desire to promote independence among poor farmers and the impulse to closely supervise and monitor them. This treatment contributes to the discussion of modernism during the late rural New Deal.