1. See Drabenstott 1999, “New Futures for Rural America: The Role for Land-Grant Universities.” Two books that describe the changing structure of American agriculture are Gardner 2002, American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost, and Fitzgerald 2003, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. Buttel, Larson, and Gillespie 1990, The Sociology of Agriculture, is another valuable source.
2. See the work of William Friedland, especially “The New Globalization: The Case of Fresh Produce,” 1994. An excellent overview of the local and global dimensions of the food system is presented in Norberg-Hodge, Merrifield, and Gorelick 2000, “Bringing the Food Economy Home.”
3. Any comprehensive farm management textbook describes the production function and will discuss its underlying assumptions. See, for example, Kay 1986, Farm Management: Planning, Control, and Implementation.
4. Lyson and Raymer have examined interlocking corporate directorates among the ten largest food-processing corporations in the United States. See Lyson and Raymer 2000, “Stalking the Wily Multinational: Power and Control in the U.S. Food System.”
5. An early attempt to understand how large cities feed themselves was provided by Walter Hedden in 1929. Hedden coined the term “foodshed” to describe the geographic boundaries of a city's food supply. See Hedden 1929, How Great Cities Are Fed.
1. See Kolb and de S. Brunner 1940, A Study of Rural Society: Its Organization and Changes, p. 46.
2. I computed these figures from data in the 1870 U.S. Census of Population.
3. See Douglas Harper 2001, Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture. Harper is a visual sociologist who has documented how dairy farming in the Northeast changed from a community-centered enterprise in the early part of the twentieth century to an industrially organized commodity-centered enterprise today. He uses photos from the Standard Oil archive and his own work to illustrate these changes.
4. See Robinson and Briggs 1991, “The Rise of Factories in Nineteenth-Century Indianapolis.”
5. See United States Census Office 1872, A Compendium of the Ninth Census.
6. Karl Polanyi 1944, in The Great Transformation, notes the importance of redistribution and reciprocity as organizing principles for the economy prior to the industrial revolution.
7. For a discussion of craft production and mass production see Piore and Sabel 1984, The Second Industrial Divide.
8. Ibid., p. 160.
9. Robinson and Briggs 1991, p. 650.
10. Piore and Sabel 1984, p. 20.
11. Fordism and Taylorism represent the organizational and management dimensions of modern mass production. See Linda Lobao 1990, Locality and Inequality, for a discussion of Fordism.
12. Many rural communities built lyceum halls to house the traveling chautauquas. Chautauquas are a system of home study; they were popular after the Civil War and often included a summer school. For a discussion of the chautauqua movement see Gould 1961, The Chautauqua Movement: An Episode in the Continuing American Revolution.
13. Many books and monographs describe the land-grant college system. See, for example, Nevins 1962, The Origins of the Land-Grant Colleges and State Universities: A Brief Account of the Morrill Act of 1862 and Its Results, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges 1995, The Land-Grant Tradition.
14. The obstacles that prevented farming from following the path of manufacturing toward mass production are outlined in Mann and Dickinson 1978, “Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture.” For a counter view see Mooney 1982, “Labor Time, Production Time, and Capitalist Development in Agriculture: A Reconsideration of the Mann-Dickinson Thesis.”
15. For a discussion of how farmers viewed the introduction of scientific techniques into farming see Taylor and Jones 1964, Rural Life and Urbanized Society, p. 384.
16. Jeffers 1916, “How the Investigator in Farm Management Problems Can Help the Farmer,” p. 7.
17. Although modern farm management techniques have decontextualized the farm and farmer from his/her local community, early agricultural economists saw the importance of community. George Warren, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, writing in 1914 put it this way: “There is much to learn about farming in any community that one man cannot hope to learn it alone. The experience of the community is of the utmost value to every farmer. Few farmers realize how much they owe to their neighbors.” See Warren 1914, Farm Management, p. 98. It was only after World War II that modern farm management took hold and the importance of community and neighbors faded.
18. Brand 1914, Marketing, p. 85.
19. The concept of the agricultural treadmill is presented in chapter 5 of Cochrane 1958, Farm Prices: Myths and Reality.
20. One of the first books to critically examine the production practices of American agriculture was an edited volume by Richard Merrill, Radical Agriculture, 1971. The discussion of chemical use in agriculture is Merrill 1971, “Toward a Self-Sustaining Agriculture.”
21. The literature on the social, economic, and environmental effects of agricultural biotechnologies is voluminous and growing. A few sources that will provide an entry into the literature include Evenson, Santaniello, and, Zilberman 2002, Economic and Social Issues in Agricultural Biotechnology; Shelton 2002, Agricultural Biotechnology: Informing the Dialogue, and Krimsky and Wrubel 1996, Agricultural Biotechnology and the Environment: Science, Policy, and Social Issues.
22. “Occupation” and “industry” are terms used by the U.S. Census Bureau to classify and keep track of the nation's economic activities. For a discussion of the census categories see Anderson 1988, American Census: A Social History.
23. See Bromley 1978, “Organization, Regulation, and Exploitation in the So-called ‘Urban Informal Sector’: The Street Traders of Cali, Colombia,” and Moser 1978, “Informal Sector or Petty Commodity Production: Dualism or Dependence in Urban Development.”
24. One of the classic models of economic development was proposed by W. W. Rostow 1975, How It All Began: Origins of the Modern Economy.
25. For a general discussion of economic development on a global scale see McMichael 1996, Development and Social Change.
26. Some of the first sociologists to write about the informal economy in the United States include Castells and Portes 1989, “World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics, and Effects of the Informal Economy”; Pahl and Wallace 1985, “Household Work Strategies in Economic Recession”; and Sassen-Koob 1989, “New York City's Informal Economy.”
27. A history of New York's community gardens can be found in Ferguson 1999, “A Brief History of Grassroots Greening in NYC.” A more general treatment of community gardens can be found in Sommers 1984, The Community Garden Book: New Directions for Creating and Managing Neighborhood Food Gardens in Your Town.
28. Two notable exceptions to the neglect of the informal economy in rural areas are Jensen, Cornwell, and Findeis 1995, “Informal Work in Nonmetropolitan Pennsylvania,” and Tickamyer and Wood 1998, “Identifying Participation in the Informal Economy Using Survey Research Methods.”
29. Two books that make this point include Kramer 1987, Three Farms, and Schwartz 1992, Waucoma Twilight: Generations of the Farm.
30. Schwartz 1992, p. 121.
31. The sustainable-agriculture movement in the United States is about twenty years old. What began as an interest in organic farming has expanded to include a social and economic dimension as well. Three periodicals that deal with sustainable agriculture issues include the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, American Journal of Alternative Agriculture, and Agriculture and Human Values.
1. Lehman and Krebs 1996, “Control of the World's Food Supply.”
2. These national trends also play out within individual states; see, for example, Lyson 1999, “From Plow to Plate: The Transformation of New York's Food and Agricultural System since 1910.”
3. Lyson and Geisler 1992, “Toward a Second Agricultural Divide: The Restructuring of American Agriculture.”
4. For a good overview of industrial agriculture in California see Stoll 1998, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California.
5. For an evaluation of the Freedom to Farm Act see Frydenlund 2002, “The Erosion of Freedom to Farm.”
6. Stoll 1998.
7. Kneen 1993, From Land to Mouth: Understanding the Food System, p. 37.
8. For a discussion on the future of the food system see Gussow 1991, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture: Who Will Produce Tomorrow's Food?
9. Hamm 1993, “The Potential for a Localized Food Supply in New Jersey.”
10. For a discussion of the role of farmland in a global food system see Lyson, Geisler, and Schlough 1998, “Preserving Community Agriculture in a Global Economy.”
11. Munton 1992, “Factors of Production in Modern Agriculture,” p. 61.
12. Mann and Dickinson 1978.
13. Albrecht and Murdock 1990, The Sociology of U.S. Agriculture: An Ecological Perspective, p. 56. California farmers solved the labor problem by drawing on a contingent migrant labor force composed of many different ethnic groups.
14. For a discussion of agricultural labor and problems associated with counting farmworkers see Mehta 2000, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 1997–1998: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Farmworkers.
15. Welsh 1996, The Industrial Reorganization of U.S. Agriculture, p. 20.
16. Hart 1992, “Marketing Agricultural Produce.”
17. Drabenstott 1999.
18. Ibid.
19. Northeast Dairy Business 1999, “Market Gorilla,” p. 11.
20. Drabenstott 1999.
1. Heffernan 1999, Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System.
2. Ibid.
3. Rural Advancement Foundation International 1999, “The Gene Giants: Masters of the Universe.” The Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) recently changed its name to etc-group. Its research and publications can be found at http://www.etcgroup.org.
4. Hart 1992.
5. A history of the Green Giant Company until 1979 is provided by Bengston 1991, A History of the Green Giant Company, 1903–1979.
6. Ibid., p. 227.
7. Wentz 1992, “How Martin Sees Grand Met's Global Role.”
8. See http://www.Senecafoods.com/Mainpage.html.
9. Kaufman 2000, “Consolidation in Food Retailing: Prospects for Consumers and Grocery Suppliers,” p. 21.
10. Ibid. See also Kaufman 2000, “Grocery Retailers Demonstrate Urge to Merge.”
11. Lyson and Raymer 2000.
12. Mills 1956, The Power Elite, and Domhoff 1983, Who Rules America Now? A View for the ‘80s
13. Hill 1995, “The Social Organization of Boards of Directors,” p. 250.
14. Domhoff 1983, p. 77.
15. Gatlin 1999, “Frito-Lay Shuts Down Marlboro Plant.”
16. Patch 1995, Plant Closings and Employment Loss in Manufacturing.
17. See, for example, Bellenir 1999, Diet and Nutrition Sourcebook, and Sonberg 1995, The Health and Nutrient Bible.
18. Pepsico 2003, 2003 Pepsico Annual Report, Pepsico Factbook.
19. For a general discussion of corporate reach within the food system see Bruno 1992, “The Corporate Capture of the Earth Summit”; Krebs 1992, The Corporate Reapers, pp. 289–299, and Ritchie 1993, “NAFTA's Grim Harvest, Free Trade and Sustainable Agriculture.”
20. Azzam, Lopez, and Lopez 2002, Imperfect Competition and Total Factor Productivity Growth in U.S. Food Processing.
21. The share of economic activity in agriculture accounted for by farmers, input suppliers, and marketers was computed by the agricultural economist Stewart Smith when he was at the University of Maine. It is an often-cited statistic. See Smith 1992, “‘Farming’—It's Declining in the U.S.”
22. Schlosser 2001, Fast Food Nation, p. 8.
23. For a discussion of large dry-lot dairies see Gilbert and Akor 1988, “Increasing Structural Divergence in U.S. Dairying: California and Wisconsin since 1950.” For a comprehensive treatment of the industrialization of the livestock sector see Hinrichs and Welsh 2003, “The Effects of the Industrialization of U.S. Livestock Agriculture on Promoting Sustainable Production Practices.” See also Welsh 2003, “Agro-food System Restructuring and the Geographic Concentration of U.S. Swine Production.”
24. The Internet has many sites devoted to food and agriculture issues. Not only do all the major food and agribusiness companies maintain Web sites, but a wide range of public interest Web sites can also be found. The site at www.factoryfarming.com is run by the Farm Sanctuary, which is a U.S.-based organization devoted to animal welfare issues. Its headquarters is in Watkins Glen, New York.
25. Heffernan 1999.
1. Lyson 2000, “Moving toward Civic Agriculture.”
2. DeLind 2002. “Place, Work, and Civic Agriculture: Fields for Cultivation.”
3. Some good examples of civic agriculture enterprises can be found in Green and Hilchey 2002, Growing Home: A Guide to Reconnecting Agriculture, Food, and Communities.
4. A search of the National Agriculture Library yielded hundreds of books with the title Farm Management. Almost all of the books treat the farmer as a rational, economically motivated problem solver.
5. For a contemporary treatment of community problem solving see Young 1999, Small Towns in Multilevel Society.
6. Mills and Ulmer 1946, Small Business and Civic Welfare. This study was reprinted in Aiken and Mott 1970, The Structure of Community Power.
7. Mills and Ulmer did not divulge the names of the six cities they studied in their report. However, by triangulation and reassessing their original data, Lynn Ryan MacKenzie was able to identify the cities. The matched pairs were Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Flint, Michigan; Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Dearborn, Michigan; and Rome, New York, and Nashua, New Hampshire. See MacKenzie 1994, “Capitalism, Power, and Community Well-being: Developing a Model for Understanding the Effect of Local Economic Configuration on Cities and Their Citizens.”
8. Cited in Mills and Ulmer 1946, p. v.
9. Ibid., p. 22.
10. Ibid., p. 3.
11. Ibid., pp. 22–23.
12. Goldschmidt 1946, Small Business and the Community. This study was reprinted as Goldschmidt 1978, As You Sow.
13. Goldschmidt 1978, p. 393.
14. Ibid., p. 395.
15. Ibid., pp. 415–416.
16. Ibid., p. 284.
17. Ibid., pp. 200–201.
18. See Barham 2003, “Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labeling.”
19. Zeitlin 1989, “Introduction,” p. 370.
20. Sabel 1993, “Studied Trust: Building New Forms of Cooperation in a Volatile Economy.”
21. Perrow 1993, “Small Firm Networks,” p. 298.
22. For background material related to the civic community approach see Putnam 1993, Making Democracy Work; Barber 1995, Jihad vs. McWorld; and Tolbert, Lyson, and Irwin 1998, “Local Capitalism, Civic Engagement, and Socioeconomic Well-being.”
23. Irwin, Tolbert, and Lyson 1997, “How to Build Strong Towns.”
24. Piore and Sabel 1984, and Bagnasco and Sabel 1995, Small and Medium Size Enterprises.
25. Barber 1995.
26. Interest in pragmatism appears to be increasing among social scientists. It is claimed that pragmatism is the only uniquely American social theory. For an early take on pragmatism by a prominent sociologist see Mills 1964, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America. A useful Web site is http://www.pragmatism.org.
27. See, for example, Inkeles 1966, The Modernization of Man, and Ingelhart 1997, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies.
28. Polanyi 1944 and Tocqueville 1836, Democracy in America.
29. Block 1990, Postindustrial Possibilities, p. 39.
30. Putnam 1993, p. 90.
31. Esman and Uphoff 1984, Local Organizations: Intermediaries in Rural Development, p. 40.
32. Putnam 1993, p. 88.
33. A number of books written in the last twenty-five years make this point and link it to the deindustrialization of large parts of the United States. See, for example, Bowles, Gordon, and Weiskopf 1983, Beyond the Wasteland; Korten 1995, When Corporations Rule the World; and Mander and Goldsmith 1996, The Case against the Global Economy.
34. Barber, 1995.
35. For a description of the possibilities of a more locally organized economy see Shuman 1998, Going Local: Creating Self-reliant Communities in a Global Age.
36. McMichael 1996.
37. Piore and Sabel 1984.
38. The emergence of a corporate-oriented economy has attracted attention since at least the 1950s. For a early views on this phenomenon see Mills 1951, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and Whyte 1956, The Organization Man.
39. Goldschmidt 1978, and Mills and Ulmer 1946.
40. See Goodman and DuPuis 2002, “Knowing Food and Growing Food: Beyond the Production-Consumption Debate in the Sociology of Agriculture.”
41. Barber 1995, p. 15.
42. North Korea is perhaps the one country that has failed to adopt a market-based system of agriculture. Even Cuba has opened up large segments of its agricultural economy to markets.
43. For a discussion of the different types of capital see Flora 1995, “Social Capital and Sustainability: Agriculture and Communities in the Great Plains and the Corn Belt,” and Flora et al. 1997, “Entrepreneurial Social Infrastructure and Locally Initiated Economic Development.”
44. Young 1999.
45. Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990 (FACTA), Public Law 101–624, Title XVI, Subtitle A, Section 1603 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1990).
46. Beus and Dunlap 1990, “Conventional versus Alternative Agriculture: The Paradigmatic Roots of the Debate.”
47. The U.S. Congress was aware of the problems facing small businesses at the end of World War II. It held hearings to assess the situation and also commissioned the 1946 studies by Goldschmidt and by Mills and Ulmer. See “Report of the Smaller War Plants Corporation to the Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business,” Document 135, U.S. Senate, 79th Congress, 2nd session.
48. For a discussion of the Pax Americana period see Bluestone and Harrison 1982, The Deindustrialization of America.
49. Ibid., p. 126.
50. Ibid., p. 132.
51. See also Bowles, Gordon, and Weiskopf 1983.
52. Bluestone and Harrison 1982, p. 139.
1. Green and Hilchey 2002. See also Lyson and Green 1999, “The Agricultural Marketscape: A Framework for Sustaining Agriculture and Communities in the Northeast.”
2. Civic agriculture should be viewed as an ideal type. Ideal types are mental constructs against which empirical cases can be compared. The characteristics of the ideal type of civic agriculture were drawn from a number of sources including Wilkins 1995, “Seasonal and Local Diets: Consumers’ Role in Achieving a Sustainable Food System”; Center for Rural Affairs 1988, “Agriculture: A Foundation for Rural Economic Development”; Waters 1990, “The Farm—Restaurant Connection”; Bird, Bultena, and Gardner 1995, Planting the Future; Kloppenburg 1991, “Social Theory and the De/reconstruction of Agricultural Science: Local Knowledge for an Alternative Agriculture”; Kneen 1993; Johnston and Bryant 1987, “Agricultural Adaptation: The Prospects for Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities”; and Lyson, Gillespie, and Hilchey 1995, “Farmers’ Markets and the Local Community: Bridging the Formal and Informal Economy.”
3. For background on community supported agriculture see Fieldhouse 1996, “Community Shared Agriculture”; Cone, Myhre, and Grey 2000, “Community-Supported Agriculture: A Sustainable Alternative to Industrial Agriculture?” and Kittredge 1996, “Community Supported Agriculture: Rediscovering Community.”
4. Dyck 1992, “Inside the Food System: How Do Community Supported Farms Work?”
5. Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) is an excellent source of practical information on CSAs. See, for example, Greer 1999, Community Supported Agriculture.
6. Cone and Kakaliouras 1995, “The Quest for Purity, Stewardship of the Land, and Nostalgia for Socialability: Resocializing Commodities through Community Supported Agriculture.”
7. Restaurant-supported agriculture (RSA) is a relatively recent phenomenon. Only a few studies have begun to examine the potential economic and social impacts of RSA. The following are useful places to learn more about RSA. ATTRA, www.attra.org/attra-pub/altmeat.html; Berkshire Grown, www.berkshiregrown.com; and Chef's Collaborative, www.chefnet.com/cc2000. See also Green and Hilchey 2002.
8. For some background information on farmers’ markets see Lyson, Gillespie, and Hilchey 1995. A good empirical study of farmers’ markets is Hughes and Mattson 1992, Farmers’ Markets in Kansas: A Profile of Vendors and Market Organization.
9. See references in note 8 above. See also Hilchey, Lyson, and Gillespie 1995, Farmers’ Markets and Rural Economic Development.
10. Lyson, Gillespie, and Hilchey 1995.
11. Hemlick 1991, “Agriculture Adapts to Urbanization: Linking Agriculture to the Economy.”
12. Rhodus, Schwartz, and Hoskins 1994, “Ohio Consumer Opinions of Roadside Markets and Farmers’ Markets.”
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Rees 1997, “Why Urban Agriculture?” and Woodsworth 1995, “Community Gardening: A Vancouver Perspective.”
16. Woodsworth, 1995.
17. The American Community Garden Association is an important source of information about urban gardens, community gardens, and school gardens: see http://www.communitygarden.org. The quote is from “Comprehensive Plans, Zoning Regulations, and Goals Concerning Community Gardens and Open Green Space from the Cities of Seattle, Berkeley, Boston, and Chicago” on the American Community Garden Web site.
18. Rees 1997.
19. Trends Journal 1997 as cited in Yes! 1997, “Top Trends ’97.”
20. Information on farmers’ markets can be found at http://www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/.
21. The National Organic Program home page is at http://www. ams.usda.gov/nop/indexIE.htm.
22. The Community, Food, and Agriculture Program (CFAP) was founded in 1985 as the Farming Alternatives Program. CFAP works with agriculture and food producers and community partners to promote food and agriculture systems that sustain and strengthen farm families, local communities, and natural resources. See http://www.cfap.org.
1. Fisher and Zuiches 1994, “Challenges Confronting Agricultural Research at Land Grant Universities.”
2. Kadlec 1985, Farm Management: Decisions, Operation, Control.
3. Kay 1986.
4. Welsh 1997, “Vertical Coordination, Producer Response, and the Locus of Control over Agricultural Production Decisions.”
5. Riedl 2002, Still at the Federal Trough: Farm Subsidies for the Rich and Famous Shattered Records in 2001.
6. An early take on corporate agriculture is Merrill 1976, Radical Agriculture. More recent works include Krebs 1992 and Heffernan 1999. See also The Corporate Agribusiness Research Project at http://www.electricarrow.com/CARP/.
7. For a discussion of food system localization see Hinrichs 2003, “The Practice and Politics of Food System Localization.”
8. Green and Hilchey 2002.
9. Ibid.
10. Shuman 1998.
11. For a discussion of community capitalism see Tolbert, Lyson, and Irwin 1998.
12. Berry 1996, “Conserving Communities.”
13. Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1996, “Coming into the Foodshed.”