Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 7
From Commodity Agriculture to Civic
Agriculture
Commodity Agriculture
As American agriculture turns down the path of a new century, we see that the independent,
self-reliant farmer of the last century is rapidly disappearing from the rural landscape. Farm-
ers, who were once the backbone of the rural economy, have been reduced to mere cogs in a
well-oiled agribusiness machine. The real value in agriculture no longer rests in the commod-
ities produced by farmers, but instead is captured by the corporately controlled and integrated
sectors of the agri-food system that bracket producers with high-priced inputs on one side
and tightly managed production contracts and marketing schemes on the other side.
The prime supporters of current agricultural policy in the United States have been the
land grant colleges and universities, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and more recently
large, multinational agribusiness firms. The land-grant system was organized to bring the
methods of scientific research to agriculture. 1 At U.S. land-grant universities, the emphasis
in the classroom and research laboratory has been on commodity production . As different
production-oriented agricultural disciplines were formed over the past 120 years such as ag-
ronomy, plant pathology, the animal sciences, plant breeding, and entomology, they broke
apart “farming” bit by bit into disciplinary niches.
The goals were the same, however, across disciplines. In the plant sciences, attention was
directed at increasing commodity yields by enhancing soil fertility, reducing pests, and de-
veloping new genetic varieties. Animal scientists, on the other hand, focused on health, nutri-
tion, and breeding. The scientific and technological advances wrought by land-grant scient-
ists were filtered through a farm management paradigm in agricultural economics that cham-
pioned sets of “best management practices” as the policy blueprints for successful and pre-
sumably profitable operations. 2
Agricultural policy at the national and state levels focuses primarily on commodities as
units of observation, analysis, experimentation, and intervention. Farmers and farms have
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