The Disappearing American Farmer
...ing industry. To shed more light on that thought, the next set of statistics will clarify the nature and types of change taking place in the farming industry. One key point is that although the number of farms has decreased, the number of acres per farm has more than doubled according to the National Agricultural Statistic Service. In the 1950s, the average acreage per farm was 216 but by the 1990s it was up to 487. (“Farms and Land in Farms”) No particular decade had a significant increase in farm acreage, rather this occurred steadily over the entire period. Similarly, total irrigated acres have also increased from 25.6 million to 46.3 million. (“Farmers and the Land”) The greatest increase occurred from the late 1970s to the early 1990s when 17 million acres were added. In conjunction with this, our agricultural exports diminished in this fifty-year period. In the 1950s our average annual exports were 22.9% of total exports, but by the 1970s they were down to 19%. That decline continued into the 1990s with agricultural exports down to 15% of total exports. (“Agricultural Trade and Development”) From this it can be seen that we are really dealing with fewer but larger farms, less farmers producing more goods, and a greater share of production supplying our own economy. How can today’s farming industry account for these significant changes? First, and most importantly, industrialization has revolutionized the face of farming. According to the U.S.D.A in 1954 the number of tractors on farms exceeded the number of horses and mules for the first time. (“Farm Machinery and Technology”) Since then labor has been increasingly performed by machines. It also should be noted that technology has made farming more efficient. New technologies have made farm equipment bigger, better, and faster. There have also been vast technological improvements in irrigation and soil tilling methods. Science and engineering have changed farming in areas such as seed generation (to produce more resilient and higher yielding crops), and more effective fertilizers and pesticides. Most of the technology, science, and engineering improvements have taken place since the 1970s. In effect, the “high tech” farmer can produce more goods in less time with less people. The advantages of new equipment and technologies are not as readily available to everyone in the farming industry. In fact, large-scale tillers and harvesting equipment can be prohibitively expensive for the small farmer and will not produce a cost benefit at lower production levels. By not having this equipment, independent and small operation farmers are not able to compete productively with their corporate counterparts and as such must supply smaller markets or be driven out of business completely. This appears to be evident in the fact that fewer but larger farms are surviving as time goes on. There is also more competition from external sources as trade barriers worldwide are coming down between nations. This also works against the independent farmer who can do little to reduce costs in comparison to their larger competitors. More and more local farmers are forced to work for low profit margins that make them economically unstable. Another example of external forces at work against the independent farmer is that larger corporations can operate in more than one location or even more than one country, which can help cut costs for labor and sustain the business when one area is experiencing environmental problems such as drought or freezing. This would allow a corporate agricultural firm to endure hard times by drawing production from other locations. The local farmer has no such advantage. In essence, the larger more productive producers are supplanting the smaller less efficient operations. There are those who feel that these changes in the farming industry are not without their consequences. According to Andrew Kimbrell, a public interes...