October is harvest month, and with it comes the celebration of food and those who grow it.
In the course of American history, no one has documented the life of the farmer better than the photographers of the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information during the Great Depression.
Tasked by the US government to portray the poverty that had struck the nation, the FSA's photographers focused their efforts on rural areas in the hope of gaining support for the resettlement of farmers who had been displaced by the Great Depression.
While many famous images came out of the FSA during this era, such as Dorthea Lange's instantly recognizable Migrant Mother and Walker Evans' Farmer Wife, there are troves of lesser-known images in the archive that is stored and kept by the Library of Congress. 170,000 of those photos recently became available to the public through Photogrammer, a web site developed by Yale University.
We've gathered 20 incredible, lesser-known portraits of the farmers who performed back-breaking work during one of the nation's most trying times.
SEE ALSO: 21 pictures of New York City in the early 1900s
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Farmers sit on bags of rice in a state mill in Abbeville, Louisiana in September 1938.
Farmer Chris Ament stands on his wheat farm in the Columbia Basin, where he has farmed for 33 years. "I won't live to get the benefits of the water, but I hope to be able to see it," he said to the FSA.
A clover farmer works on a seed threshing machine in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana.
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