Years ago, independent farms were the backbone of the rural economy, as farmers spent money at local businesses, from the feed store and implement dealer to the coffee shop. As farming has consolidated, with some farms getting much bigger and the rest closing down, the downtown businesses that relied on them have shuttered as well. This trend has been exacerbated by vertical integration of agribusiness, so that one company owns the entire supply chain, rather than supporting many independent businesses.
Because sustainable farms are smaller than their consolidated industrial counterparts, they still purchase goods from local vendors, when they can find them. It is important to note that workers on sustainable farms too often get left out of this equation. For a host of reasons, costs of production are generally higher on these farms than those of large farm operations. They must pass these costs along to the consumer, but there is a limit to what consumers will pay.
Even with higher prices, many farms are operating at the narrowest of margins — sometimes the farmers are not even paying themselves a salary. How to pay their workers a living wage is a complicated financial question many sustainable farmers wrestle with.
Industrial operators are not much better in terms of workers, however. These days, industrial operations like a large CAFO or a meat processing plant attempting to open in a rural community will make promises about jobs; the reality rarely lives up to the hype.
Jobs at these operations are inevitably low-wage and without benefits or long-term security, and carry high risks of personal injury. Further, the jobs frequently do not even go to community residents, as operators have found that they can pay migrant workers or immigrants far less for the same work.
All too often, this ends up with a community bitter about the tax burden from the influx of new residents, the smell or noise from the facility and the broken job promises, and an immigrant labor force who is underpaid and exploited.
The only winner is the corporate operator. This is despite the fact that agricultural production today already produces 2, daily calories for every person on earth — enough to feed the population of 10 billion we expect by Additionally, research has shown that various kinds of sustainable agriculture do achieve yields in the range of those obtained by chemical-dependent methods. Depending on the circumstances and crop, sustainable yields have been shown to be equivalent, slightly greater particularly in drought conditions, which is increasingly important as the climate changes , or 15 to 20 percent lower than those of chemical agriculture.
A different kind of federal agriculture policy could help farmers and taxpayers, and curb many of the worst impacts of industrialization. A policy based on supply management, which creates a grain reserve a common sense protection against low yield years and a floor price for farmers, would not incentivize fencerow-to-fencerow planting, making it easier for farmers to take marginal lands land not worth farming because it would not make enough money out of production.
A analysis by Dr. The Food from Family Farms Act by the National Family Farm Coalition , is one example of a farm bill proposal to reinstate reserves and fair prices, along with ecologically sustainable planting and a more secure disaster program. There are also ways to put a price tag on externalities. First name Last name Email address. How Was Agriculture Industrialized? From Antibiotics to Pesticides. The Impacts of Industrial Agriculture The rationale for the industrialization of agriculture was the need to ensure a cheap, safe food supply for a rapidly growing US and world population.
The Sustainable Alternative Industrial agriculture consumes finite resources without replenishing them, including the resources on which it depends, including soil nutrients , fossil fuels and water.
Benefits of Sustainable Agriculture. What Is Regenerative Agriculture? Learn the Key Principles. Environment Truly sustainable farms do not use chemical pesticides, fertilizers or genetically modified seeds. It is enhanced through higher doses of modern inputs. Crops grown Food grains, fruits and vegetables Cash crops and cereals Method of irrigation It depends on monsoon. It uses modern irrigation methods. Cultivation Traditional methods are used.
Machines are used. The type of agriculture, wherein crop growing and livestock rearing is performed, to fulfil the needs of the farmer and his family, it is called subsistence farming. Before industrialization, there are many people who depend on the subsistence farming to fulfil their needs. In this farming, there is less use of modern agricultural techniques and methods, the holding size is small and manual labours, which can be the family members of the farmers, help in the process of crop production.
The output produced is primarily used for local consumption, with little to no surplus trade. The surplus produced if any is sold to nearby markets. The decision of cropping is based on the needs of the family in the coming time and its market price.
Commercial Farming, or otherwise called as agribusiness is a farming method in which the crops are raised, and cattle are reared with the aim of selling the produce in the market, so as to earn money. In this type of agriculture, a huge amount of capital is invested, and crops are grown on a large scale in huge farms, with the use of modern technology, machines, irrigation methods, and chemical fertilizers.
The basic feature of commercial farming is that high doses of modern inputs are used for higher productivity, such as high yielding variety seeds, fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides, weedicides, etc. In commercial farming, primarily those crops which are in great demand are produced, i. Further, the extent of commercialisation of farming differs from region to region.
Also, farmers in the region produced row crops, orchard crops, hay, and grass seed. During the s, in response to increasing demand, the price of grass seed increased dramatically. As a result, Willamette Valley farmers quickly changed their focus from the production of grain to grass seed.
Soon after, several grain processing facilities closed, and grass seed cleaning, storage, and market facilities opened. There were other unexpected impacts, as well. For example, Willamette Valley grain farms once provided excellent habitat for Chinese pheasants.
Pheasants eat grain, but they do not eat grass seed. When the grain fields disappeared, so, too, did the pheasants. Like pheasants, people do not eat grass seed. On the other hand, oats, wheat, and barley are all food crops. Once a nation can meet its basic food needs, agriculture can meet other demands, such as the demand for Kentucky bluegrass for use on golf courses, lawns, and other landscaping.
As incomes go up, the demand for food crops will grow proportionately. Eventually, however, when the demand for food is satiated, subsequent increases in income will no longer bring corresponding increases in the demand for food. This is the result of the elasticity of demand relative to changes in income. The measure of elasticity of demand is calculated by noting the amount of increase in demand for an item that a unit of increase in income generates.
For example, luxury products such as expensive wines have a high elasticity of demand, whereas more common items such as rice have a low elasticity of demand. Once a family has all the rice they can typically eat, it will not purchase more as a result of more income.
More income, however, would likely bring an increase in the consumption of prime cuts of beef or other such luxury foods. New technologies in transportation, agricultural production, and the processing of food and fiber often have substantial impacts on the use of rural land.
Technological changes mainly influence transportation. For example, the construction of the rail lines that connected the Midwestern United States with the market centers of the East made it possible for farmers in Iowa, Illinois, and other prairie states to improve their profits by feeding the corn they grew to hogs which they then shipped to the markets in the east.
This is because the value of a pound of pork has always been far greater than the value of a pound of corn. Thus, by feeding the corn to the hogs, and then shipping the hogs, the farmers could earn greater profits because the shipping costs of their product were lower. In a sense, the farmers were selling corn on the hoof.
Without easy access to railheads, this profitable agricultural scheme would not have been possible. Of course, some folks have specialized in selling corn after it has been distilled into a liquid form. Over the years, improvements in technologies have tended to drive down the relative costs associated with shipping farm produce.
Furthermore, inventions such as refrigerated rail cars and trucks have eliminated some of the land- use constraints that once limited the locational choices of farmers who produced perishable goods.
Less expensive haulage costs, decreased transit times, and better handling and processing methods have all served to make transportation systems more efficient and, hence, less expensive. In theory, this should serve to reduce the importance of distance relative to other non-distance factors. Consider how far from the market a producer of fresh vegetables could locate in the early 19th century. The lack of all-weather roads and reliance on the transportation conveyances of the time human and animal power dictated a production location within a few miles of the market.
The creation of all-weather roads that could be traversed by a horse and wagon, however, changed the situation. Without the roads, fresh vegetable growers would have been forced to pay high prices for land very near the market.
With the roads, they were able to use less expensive land and still get their crops to market before spoilage made it impossible to sell them. If the creation of an all-weather road made such a difference in land uses, imagine the impacts of the refrigerated aircraft now used to deliver loads of fresh flowers. Currently, many of the fresh flowers sold in US supermarkets come to the United States from the Netherlands via giant jet transport aircraft.
This technology has significantly altered the importance of distance relative to the production of fresh flowers. Introduction to Human Geography by R. Skip to content Today, there are two divisions of agriculture, subsistence and commercial, which roughly correspond to the less developed and more developed regions. Making Sense of Land Use Geographers are concerned with understanding why things happen in geographical spaces. The Future of Farming and Agriculture.
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