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Stressed settlers: Carly E. Nichols, ‘Frustrated farmers and the fee simple: property-stress, settler colonialism and race in the United States heartland’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2025

14Feb25

Abstract: The notion that farming is an unusually stressful occupation has become a cultural truism, with calls to investigate ‘root causes’ of stress on the farm. This paper argues the racialized, colonialist foundations of United States fee simple property is a ‘root cause’ of farm stress in the US corn belt. I build on work that sees farm property as not just a vehicle for economic gains, but imbricated in the performance and affective experience of whiteness and settler personhood. Drawing on interviews with Midwestern women farmers, I find many of their concerns fall into a category that I call ‘property-stress’. That is, while most are fiercely allegiant to the sanctity of the fee-simple farm and vigorously ‘defend’ their land rights, the very nature of the fee simple as abstract, commodifiable, and perpetual simultaneously engenders a competitive landscape that generates much stress. I argue that the racialized agrarianist logics undergirding Midwest agriculture produce particular racial and colonialist valences in land as well as a contradictory relationship with the federal sovereign who is ultimately the underwriter of white possession. These dynamics mean when the colonialist-capitalist vision of fee-simple property ‘fail’, it creates existential stress and forecloses opportunities to imagine a Midwest otherwise.


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