From Subsistence to Production - Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community - page 12

the “rational calculations” of the farm operator, were deemed “externalities” and largely ig-
nored as unimportant to agricultural production. 17
From the very beginning, this organizational blueprint for agriculture was set up to in-
dustrialize farming by mimicking the model of mass-production manufacturing. As early as
1913, farm management specialists were guiding agriculture into the mainstream economy.
Charles Brand, speaking to the annual meeting of American Farm Management Association,
noted:
Agriculture is a business industry, and as such is merely one part of the great business structure
of the country. If farming is to continue profitable … we must in the next decade or two give the
same attention to the business side of farming that we have in the past two decades to the producing
side. 18
When set in motion, the neoclassical “production function” model of farming was de-
signed to increase agricultural productivity by substituting capital in the form of machinery,
chemicals, and other purchased inputs and management inputs for labor and land. The goal
was to increase agricultural production on less land and by using less labor. In this model the
farm manager is the prime mover behind the whole operation. It is the farmer who orches-
trates how the factors of production will be deployed on his farm.
Over the past hundred years, land-grant universities, the USDA, and more recently large
agribusiness firms have thrown farmers wave upon wave of new technologies on the path
to industrialization. Willard Cochrane saw these new technologies as a “technological tread-
mill” that the farmers had to hew to if they expected to survive. Farmers who slipped off
the treadmill were often branded as “laggards” and held in disdain by the efficiency-orien-
ted agricultural community. It is easy to see why so many farmers failed to keep pace on
the treadmill. As craft production gave way to mass production in the manufacturing sector
and “scientific management” wrested control of the shop floor out of the hands of workers,
American farmers were yoked to a set of technologies that promised to make production easi-
er and more efficient—but at a cost. That cost was that fewer and fewer producers would be
needed. 19
Three Agricultural Revolutions
The industrialization of American agriculture was marked by three major technological “re-
volutions.” The first, the “mechanical revolution,” dates from the early 1900s, when tractors
and associated farm machinery were introduced to the farm. In 1910 fewer than 1 percent of
the nation's 6.4 million farms had a tractor. By 1950, there were over 3.4 million tractors on
5.4 million farms. The introduction of the tractor allowed a farmer to work more land and
consequently reduced the need for farm labor. Not surprisingly, between 1910 and 1950, the