Jeff Roche

speaker

654 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 20 Dec

Jeff Roche’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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New Books in History · Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025) · 20 Dec 2025 podcast

You let it lie dormant in the winter and it comes up in the spring.

And you harvest it in early summer.

And it's a kind of crop that lends itself to mechanized agriculture.

And this is what's happening.

This is the middle of a major revolution in agriculture where tractors are replacing animal power.

And West Texas, the Pantanal especially, embraces tractors more than almost any other region in the country.

And you can now farm at a slightly different scale.

If you're a cotton farmer in East Texas, for example,

40 acres is about all a family could possibly hope to farm because cotton farming is just backbreaking labor.

But they're doing long staple cotton that's harvested with a tractor in the panel.

So you can have 320 acres because you're doing it on a machine.

So this is the agricultural wonderland, and the ranchers and the other land companies are also building out small towns that serve the needs of these commercial family farmers, both in terms of there's going to be a tractor dealership there, there's going to be an auto dealership there, but there's also going to be a haberdasher, and there's going to be a beauty salon, and there's going to be a barbershop, and there's going to be a local newspaper, and there's going to be a bank, and there's going to be lawyers.

So all to service this new modern tech forward agricultural commercial family, commercial family agricultural model that they're building out.

And as you mentioned, I call it the agricultural wonderland.

And it's incredibly successful for, well, successful until it stopped raining.

Yeah, the land companies are, because they bought the land either through sort of surveying teams for, you know, anywhere of 12 cents an acre, and then you can buy it from the state for 50 cents an acre.

And they can sell it for $1.50 too and just make incredible profits.

And then when you build out a town, you know, Dwight, I'm sorry, T.D.

Hobart.

built out the town of Pampa.

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