Abstract
This is a big-picture article based on a lifetime's cumulative research. It builds on versions of the paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society in Boston in 2005 and in Springfield, Illinois, in 2010, and discusses an ideal that shaped farming and rural communities in several New World countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But this ideal lasted longer and achieved greater hegemony in New Zealand. This article tries to explain the ideal's greater importance and longevity as resulting from the close fit between New Zealand's traditional stock-raising methods and the family-farming model. It also attempts to account for the ideal's more recent demise and concludes that New Zealand is probably moving into a "post-Yeotopian era" as this small and isolated country faces big changes in international food production techniques.