Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
retail outlets and under corporate brands at Target,
Wal-Mart, and Sam's Club.
The push for fair trade production shows how social
movements can infl uence agriculture. And fair trade goes
beyond coffee. Dozens of commodities and products,
ranging from tea, bananas, fresh cut fl owers, and choco-
late to soccer balls, can be certifi ed fair trade. According
to Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International, con-
sumers spent more than $4.84 billion on fair trade certi-
fi ed products in 2008.
People's changing tastes also shape the geography of
agriculture. Tea is a rather recent addition to the Western
diet. It was grown in China perhaps 2000 years ago, but it
became popular in Europe only during the nineteenth
century. The colonial powers (mainly the British) estab-
lished enormous tea plantations in Asia and thus began
the full-scale fl ow of tea into European markets. Tea pro-
duction, both the fair trade and the traditionally traded
varieties, is on the rise globally to meet the increasing
demand.
Even as social preferences shape agricultural pro-
duction, the consumption of particular products can have
social consequences. Just a few decades ago, city dwellers
in West Africa primarily consumed grains grown from
nearby fi elds. Over the past three decades, relatively cheap
imported rice from Malaysia and Thailand has become an
important food source, and many locals came to prefer the
taste of the imported rice. This set of circumstances left
West Africa vulnerable when the price of imported grains
skyrocketed in 2008. Local riots broke out and a food
crisis ensued.
by contracting and working directly with four major poul-
try companies. In an article on modern agriculture, David
Lanegran summarized the impact of this transformation
as follows:
Today, chickens are produced by large agribusiness com-
panies operating hatcheries, feed mills, and process-
ing plants. They supply chicks and feed to the farm-
ers. The farmers are responsible for building a house
and maintaining proper temperature and water sup-
ply. Once a week the companies fi ll the feed bins for the
farmers, and guarantee them a price for the birds. The
companies even collect market-ready birds and take
them away for processing and marketing. Most of the
nation's poultry supply is handled by a half dozen very
large corporations that control the process from chicks to
chicken pieces in stores.
Lanegran goes on to show how selective breeding has
produced faster growing, bigger chickens, which are
housed in enormous broiler houses that are largely
mechanized.
Broiler houses are concentrated in northwestern
Arkansas, northern Georgia, the Delmarva Peninsula
(Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia) east of Washington,
D.C., the Piedmont areas of North Carolina, and the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (Fig. 11.21). Lanegran
shows that in many respects the “farmers” who manage
these operations are involved in manufacturing as much
or more than farming. They are as likely to spend their
time talking to bank offi cers, overseeing the repair of
equipment, and negotiating with vendors as they are tend-
ing their animals. As such, they symbolize the breakdown
between the rural and the urban in wealthier parts of the
world—as well as the interconnections between rural
places and distant markets.
The poultry example is not unusual. During the
1990s, hog production on the Oklahoma and Texas pan-
handles increased rapidly with the arrival of corporate
hog farms. John Fraser Hart and Chris Mayda described
the quick change with statistics. In 1992, the U.S. Census
of Agriculture counted just over 31,000 hogs marketed in
Texas County, Oklahoma, and just four years later “the
panhandle was plastered with proliferating pork places,
and Texas County alone produced 2 million hogs. It was
the epicenter of an area that produced 4 million hogs,
4 percent of the national total and one-seventh as many
fi nished hogs as the entire state of Iowa.” The availability
of both inexpensive water and natural gas on the
Oklahoma panhandle was enticing for corporate hog
farms, which require both. Hart and Mayda explain that
the “reasonable” price of land and the accessibility to
“growing metropolitan markets of the South and the
West” also made the region attractive for hog produc-
tion. Similar to poultry production, a corporation built a
Agribusiness and the Changing Geography
of Agriculture
The commercialization of crop production and the
associated development of new agricultural technolo-
gies have changed how agricultural goods are grown
and have sparked the rapid growth of agribusiness.
Agribusiness
is an encompassing term for the busi-
nesses that provide a vast array of goods and services to
support the agricultural industry. Agribusiness serves to
connect local farms to a spatially extensive web of pro-
duction and exchange. At the same time, it fosters the
spatial concentration of agricultural activities. Both of
these trends are revealed in the development of the
poultry industry in the United States.
Early in the twentieth century, poultry production in
the United States was highly disaggregated, with many
farmers raising a few chickens as part of a multifaceted
farming operation. Over the past 50 years, however, poul-
try production has fundamentally changed. Today, the
farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula account for 8 percent
of poultry production in the United States, and they do so
