Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Source: U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1997.
Large-scale producers in the United States are accounting for an ever increasing share of
production. Consider that the number of America's largest farms, those with average sales of
over $500,000 a year or greater, grew by over 600 percent, from 11,412, to 68,794, between
1974 and 1997. During this same period, the total number of farms dipped from 2.3 to 1.9
million.
Very large farms are more likely than smaller farms to receive government payments and
to be organized as corporations. In 1997, very large farms, those generating over $500,000
a year in sales, comprised less than 3.6 percent of all farms in the country. However, they
operated nearly 20 percent of the farmland and accounted for 56 percent of all farm sales.
At the top of the heap are the megafarms, those operations with annual sales of $1 million
or more a year. In 1997 there were 25,934 farms in this category. These million-dollar farms
represent only 1.4 percent of all U.S. farms, but they produce almost 42 percent of all farm
products sold.
Many of these large-scale operations have taken on the organizational characteristics and
adopted sets of production practices that mimic the mass-production model of manufactur-
ing. 3 The guiding business principles are that production should be concentrated into fewer
units to capture economies of scale, machinery should be substituted for labor whenever pos-
sible, and an advanced division of labor should replace the multiple and diverse tasks per-
formed by the “typical” family farmer.
As American agriculture became more specialized and more highly capitalized at the farm
gate, it also became more highly specialized by commodity and more regionally concen-
trated. In 1910, almost 90 percent of all farms raised poultry, over 80 percent had dairy cattle,
about 70 percent raised hogs, and nearly 75 percent had horses. Even by 1950, significant
proportions of American farmers were still engaged in these animal enterprises. However, by
1997, only 5 percent of U.S. farms reported poultry, 6 percent had dairy cattle, fewer than 6
percent raised hogs, and fewer than 20 percent had horses. Most of the horse farms, of course,
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