COMMERCIAL VS. SUBSISTENCE AGRICULTURE

Commercial vs. Subsistence Agriculture

Commercial vs. Subsistence Agriculture

Geographers have tended to study industrialization from an urban perspective, largely overlooking its relationship to rural landscapes. This urban bias limits our ability to see that urbanization could not have occurred without technological change in agriculture that allowed fewer farms to produce more food. This freed other farmers to become part of the urban working class. This entry describes the origins and impacts of industrialization on agricultural production and rural landscapes.

Industrialization of Agriculture

Industrialization includes the mechanization of processes previously done by human hands. It also involves the reorganization of labor practices and the application of new energy and transportation technologies to increase the rate at which humans transform nature into goods. Increased output also requires new markets. Hence, the industrialization of agriculture involves widespread change in four areas: (1) supply of farmland, (2) public policy, (3) technological change, and (4) agribusiness consolidation along the value chain.

Prior to the 20th century, American farmers practiced an extensive form of agriculture. As demand for food increased, farmers expanded into new territory. New plows invented by John Deere made it easier to till fertile but heavy prairie soils. However, agricultural production increased because more acres were planted, not because yields per acre increased during this time. Conditions changed when the frontier closed at the end of the 19th century. With no new land to cultivate, output could grow only through increasing yields. This marked the beginning of intensive agriculture.

Industrialization has transformed the agricultural sector beyond the farm as well. As a raw commodity such as corn leaves the farm, it follows a so-called value chain that includes processing, distribution, and retail on its way to consumers. At each step, value is added to the commodity as it is transformed into products and moved closer to consumers. The problem for farmers is that large agribusinesses are working to control more and more of the value chain. Multinational firms (e.g., ConAgra, Cargill) sell inputs such as fertilizer, but they also process commodities. Under these increasingly monopolistic conditions, farmers have less bargaining power to affect the price of inputs they must buy or the crops they must sell. In the end, farmers earn a smaller portion of each dollar spent by consumers because the prices that farmers receive for their crops have stagnated, even though the prices that consumers pay continue to increase.

The political stimulus for land redistribution affects the extent to which agricultural systems are transformed, the degree of productivity increase, and the extent of economic growth that will benefit the poor. There are a number of possible scenarios, but we can learn most about agriculture and poverty reduction when land redistribution has enabled or coincided with increases in farm output and productivity from which the poor have benefited, and when land redistribution has not resulted in increases in farm output and productivity and/or has not been beneficial for the poor. A third interesting scenario exists when redistribution has indirectly contributed to agriculture and production, for example, ...