Corporate Farm Vs Family Farm
Farms are expensive to operate; input costs include farm machinery, crop insurance, fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, fuel, and seeds. Some people question whether small family farms are still economically sustainable in the United States. However, there is a growing resurgence of interest in organic, free range, and locally grown family farm products.
One major difference between independent farming and corporate farming is that a corporate farmer is usually a contracted employee, rather than the owner of the farm. However, ownership itself does not mean independence. An owner-operated farm today faces many constraints that are completely out of the owner's control. Most of these can be seen in light of increasing concentration of ownership, not only of farms, but of the equipment and inputs necessary to farm, and the available sales channels.
Production contracts are a primary means of control and vertical integration of family farms. These are of two general types. Production management contracts specify the methods farmers must use. Resource-providing contracts require the contractor to also provide materials (e.g) and equipment. Under the latter, increasingly prevalent arrangement, the family farm owns its land and "sells" its output, but retains no real decision making control over the essential farming activities, like crop selection, equipment purchase, production methods, sales channels, and buyers.
A prime example is the drive to constantly improve production efficiency, as measured by farm output. By using successive waves of new technology (in agrichemicals, mechanization, crop varieties, drugs, etc.), output has steadily risen over the past decades.
Although 14% of total food production comes from the two percent of all farms in the United States that are owned by corporations or other non-family entities, 50% of food production comes from the biggest two percent of all farms. In 1900, it came from 17% of all farms.
Read more about this topic: Corporate Farming
Famous quotes containing the words corporate, farm and/or family:
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Family lore can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it on for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)