Civic Agriculture

Industrial Agriculture

The industrialization of agricultural production since the 1880s has been guided by the belief that the primary objectives of farming should be to produce as much food and fiber as possible for the least cost. Industrial agriculture is driven by the twin goals of productivity and efficiency and focuses primarily on commodities such as corn, soybeans, or chickens as units of observation, analysis, experimentation, and intervention. Farmers and farms have been largely ignored by industrial agriculture. From the industrial agriculture perspective, farmers are viewed as managers whose primary task is to follow a set of best management practices. And farms are simply places where production occurs, devoid of connections to the local community or social order.

The industrialization of agriculture has proceeded relatively unabated from the 1920s through today, propelled by mechanization, the increased use of chemicals (synthetic fertilizers and pesticides), and most recently by advanced biotechnologies. Since the mid-twentieth century, farms have become larger in size and fewer in number. In 1950, there were 5.3 million farms, and the average farm size was approximately 200 acres. By 1997, the number of farms had fallen to about 1.9 million farms, with an average size of nearly 500 acres. Land is being used more intensively and yields per acre of farmland have increased dramatically. The amount of farmland has decreased from approximately 1.1 billion in 1950 to approximately 930 million acres in 1997, while capital investments on the farm have increased. At the same time, farms have been woven into ever-tighter marketing channels. Many industrial farms today produce products under contracts to large food processing companies.

The Emergence of Civic Agriculture

The conceptual underpinnings of civic agriculture were set forth in the literature on industrial districts. Industrial districts are regions in which a group of smaller-scale, locally oriented manufacturing and distribution enterprises are located. The success and survival of industrial districts are directly tied to the collective efforts of the local community to provide infrastructure support such as roads, sewers, and Internet access and technical expertise such as vocational training and management workshops.

Research carried out in the 1940s by anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, as well as by sociologist C. Wright Mills and economist Melville Ulmer, has illustrated the benefits of smaller-scale, locally oriented enterprises. Their studies showed that communities in which the economic base consisted of many small, locally owned firms manifested higher levels of social, economic, and political welfare than communities where the economy was dominated by a few, large, absentee-owned firms.

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