Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
1970s and early 1980s, as the first waves of industrialization swept over the agricultural land-
scape, the number of nonfamily hired laborers began to increase.
Counting farmworkers is a tricky business. Much agricultural work is seasonal. Legal and
illegal workers float into and out of the labor force. And government agencies that are re-
sponsible for keeping track of the nation's farmworkers do not often agree on basic defini-
tions. 14 However, the Census of Agriculture has provided a window that allows for a relat-
ively straightforward comparison of the number of workers per farm in 1950 and 1997. In
what is no doubt an administrative fluke, in both of these agricultural census years, data were
collected using a similar set of questions. Thus, looking at these data we know that there were
1,555,269 nonfamily workers employed on all American farms in 1950. By 1997, there were
3,352,028. It should be remembered that during this same period the number of farms in the
United States decreased by over 3 million.
California, a state whose farmers have led the way down the industrial agriculture path,
reported hiring 163,000 farm-workers in 1950. This figure includes full-time, part-time, and
migrant workers. By 1997, California farmers were employing almost 550,000 farmwork-
ers. Florida saw the number of hired workers on its farms increase from 67,000 in 1950 to
125,000 in 1997. The additional farmworkers were added during a time that Florida lost over
35 percent of its farmland and nearly 40 percent of its farmers. And North Carolina saw the
number of hired workers more than double, from 54,000 in 1950 to 127,000 in 1997. This
influx of hired labor occurred at the same time that North Carolina was losing over half of its
farmland and over 80 percent of its farmers. In all these cases, the growth of the hired work-
force on farms coupled with the decrease in the number of farms and the loss of farmland
signaled a change from traditional family farming to industrial-like agricultural production.
In most states it was not the typical family-labor farm that was adding a hired man (or wo-
man) or two to extend its operation and capture some additional economies of scale. Instead,
it was a new breed of labor-intensive, industrial-like operators that accounted for the dramat-
ic increase in hired workers. The numbers of farms that employed ten or more hired workers
went up everywhere and especially in those states where the industrial model of farming was
taking a firm hold. In California there has been a threefold increase in these labor-intensive
farms in the past fifty years. Today over 9,500 California farms, each employing on average
almost fifty workers, account for almost 85 percent of all hired farm labor in the state. In
Florida these labor-intensive farms also average over fifty workers and account for nearly 80
percent of all hired farm labor in the state.
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