Bill Stagg turning up pinto beans, Pie Town, New Mexico

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Bill Stagg is shown turning up pinto beans in Pie Town, a small farming community on the high plains of western New Mexico, which makes this picture a window onto dryland agriculture in that place. The image belongs to the broader body of documentary photography of rural America from the 1930s and 1940s, when federal agencies sent photographers into farm country to record how people worked and lived. Its setting in the Pie Town area, where settlers had come to try their hand at dry farming, gives the scene a specific local character. Look closely at the machinery and the bean fields to see how mechanized harvesting was reshaping small-scale farm work in the period.

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