Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of the Ford Motor Company. In fact, the system of mass-production manufacturing that is or-
ganized around assembly-line forms of social organization has taken on the name “Fordism”
in the contemporary economic organization literature. 11
Early Agricultural Development
Agriculture was not immune to the organizational changes experienced by the manufacturing
sector. The organization and operation of modern American farms bears little resemblance to
the way agriculture was organized in the mid 1800s. The forerunners of “scientific agricul-
ture” can be traced to the lyceum and Chautauqua movements of the 1820 to 1840 era. Dur-
ing this period information about the latest advances in agriculture and farming was passed
along through community-based educational efforts. Farm households came together in their
local neighborhoods and communities to share information, to exchange ideas, and to learn
new techniques in the local lyceums and through the traveling chautauquas. 12
The organizing impetus behind scientific agriculture in the United States was the Morrill
Act of 1862. This act established the land-grant system of colleges and universities that has
become the model of modern agriculture throughout the world. The formation of the land
grant system was the first organized and coordinated attempt to bring “rationality” and stand-
ardization to agricultural production. The Morrill Act set in motion the introduction of sci-
entific principles and applied science to agriculture. It represented the genesis of the “Amer-
ican Way of Farming.” 13
The mission of the land-grant colleges and universities was expanded in 1887 when the
Hatch Act was passed. This piece of legislation created an agricultural experiment station in
each state; their mission was to support basic and applied research in the agricultural scien-
ces. In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act established a mechanism to fund a nationally organized
system of outreach. In theory, the Cooperative Extension Service was to deliver to farms and
farm households the knowledge and techniques developed at the land-grant universities.
Unlike manufacturing, which adopted assembly-line techniques in the early part of the
twentieth century, it was clear to most agricultural scientists that the system of relatively
small-scale, family-based farming that existed at that time could not be organized along
mass-production lines. There was too much idle time for labor in the production process;
hence the division of labor along specialized task lines was difficult, if not impossible. Fur-
thermore, there were simply too many different and interrelated tasks involved in producing
food and fiber to allow much headway to be made in dividing labor among those tasks. Fin-
ally, there was incredible variability in conditions across farms in terms of soils, climate, and
other environmental variables. This environmental variability meant that farming enterprises
took different forms in different places. Even within the same state or within the same county,
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