Agricultural Scale and Community Quality

Early Studies

One of the earliest studies that tested this hypothesis was undertaken by the rural sociologist E. D. Tetreau, who examined the relationship between farm scale and community well-being in Arizona in the 1930s. Tetreau advocated a “balanced agriculture” that included enough smaller, resident family farmers to ensure community viability. According to Tetreau, “In a given area a balanced agriculture should support a sufficient proportion of farmowners' families to maintain local government and public education according to accepted standards. Any excessive reduction in the numbers of resident owner families will tend to weaken local initiative and deliberations without which popular government is an empty shell”” (Tetreau 1940, p. 204).

In what has become the touchstone for social scientists [Page 30]interested in this topic, anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt contrasted communities of large and small farms in California in the 1940s. Goldschmidt's findings were originally published as a report to the U.S. Senate in 1946 titled Small Business and the Community. The report was later republished in 1978 as a book, As You Sow.

Arvin, the community of large farms in Goldschmidt's study, was dominated by farms that were considerably bigger than those found in Dinuba, the community of smaller farms. According to Goldschmidt, “The differences between average farm size are great—in the neighborhood of 9 to 1 when taken on an acreage basis, 5 to 1 in value of products, and 3 to 1 if adjusted for intensity of operations. Nine-tenths of all farm land is operated in units of 160 acres of more in Arvin as against one-fourth in Dinuba”” (Goldschmidt 1978, p. 393). However, both Arvin and Dinuba were similar in population size, shared value systems and social customs, and were “part of a common system of agricultural production, best understood as industrialized” (p. 393).

Goldschmidt sought to relate the scale of farm operations to social and economic factors reflecting the two communities' quality of society. He found that residents in the community dominated by large-scale, corporately controlled farming experienced lower standards of living and quality of life than residents in the community where production was dispersed among a large number of smaller farms. Goldschmidt concluded that “the reported differences in communities may properly be assigned confidently and overwhelmingly to the scale of farming factor” (p. 284). In his conclusions, he noted that Arvin's large-scale farming operations led to the majority of the population's having to work as wage labor for others. That in turn had a direct effect on social conditions in the community.

In the 1980s, rural sociologist Dean MacCannell compared social and economic conditions in counties in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida in which agriculture was highly industrialized to conditions in counties in which agriculture was the dominant industry, but was not highly industrialized. MacCannell found that communities surrounded by industrial farms showed income extremes, with a few wealthy families, many poor ones, and almost no middle class. The absence of a middle class, he noted, had a serious negative effect on the commercial life of the communities and on their social services, public education, and local government. He concluded that as agricultural industrialization increases, farm size increases and social conditions in rural communities become worse.

...