Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the variability across farms could be tremendous. Unlike factories, which could standard-
ize the production process, farms could not standardize the environmental conditions under
which they produced food. 14
Despite these caveats, the community of agricultural scientists at the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) and on the campuses of America's land-grant universities, along with
agribusiness leaders, assumed that productivity and output could be increased by standard-
izing and rationalizing the production process. The pressure to increase productivity to meet
the needs of a rapidly expanding mass market for agricultural commodities was the driving
force behind the introduction of “modern farming methods.” The land-grant system rose to
the challenge by devising new production techniques, new equipment, and new and improved
crop varieties that continually boosted agricultural productivity.
However, the advocates of scientific agriculture were faced with a “clientele” of farmers
who were rooted in tradition, suspicious of “book-learned” techniques, and averse to risk. 15
If agriculture was going to modernize and keep pace with advances in the manufacturing sec-
tor, it needed an organizational model or blueprint that could be presented to farmers as a
rationale for accepting (buying into) the new ways of producing food. If American farmers
were to break out of the mold of producing food in ways that were not markedly different
from the ways of their ancestors, they needed some assurance that they would not go broke
in the process.
The answer to the farmer's need for guidance was emerging in the field of economics.
Throughout the early 1900s, the first generation of agricultural economists worked to devise
a standard set of criteria that would allow farm enterprises to be evaluated along the same
lines as manufacturing enterprises.
At the Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Farm Management Association in 1916,
the vice president of the organization, H. W. Jeffers from Plainsboro, New Jersey, put it this
way: “What is needed is a clear cut, standard farm plan for each type of farming in each re-
gion so that a person starting farming in a new region, or the farmer who is not making the
farm pay, or the extension worker who is conducting demonstrations can make use of such a
plan by modifying it to meet the local conditions.” 16
In working through this endeavor, economists found it was necessary to decontextualize
the farm enterprise from the community and household settings in which it was embedded.
That is, they found it necessary to remove the household and community context from the
economic function of production agriculture. This was done by building a model of agricul-
ture that rested squarely on individual decision making related to the four economic factors
of production: land, labor, capital, and management/entrepreneurship. The sine qua non of
farming to economists was to provide the information needed to educate farm operators about
how to balance the four factors to maximize both output and profitability. Social relations in
the household and community, along with nonmarket transactions that might impinge upon
Search WWH ::




Custom Search