Corporate Farming in the United States

Abstract

Corporate farming is not new in the United States. The companies of “gentlemen adventurers” setting out in the seventeenth century to establish settlements in the New World were not corporations in a modern sense, but in organizational form and motivation they bear a striking resemblance to corporation farming ventures of recent decades. The twin lures of short-run profits and long-run capital gains have been major forces in shaping land use patterns and institutional structures throughout America's history. For over 300 years repeated efforts were made to use large scale organizational forms to reap these rewards in agriculture. Up to 1950 the record was one of almost consistent failure.

Store Wars: The Enactment and Repeal of Anti‐Chain‐Store Legislation in America

“…Furthermore, both were what Chandler and Galambos (1970) call "secondary organizations," engaged mainly in coordinating other organizations, in contrast to the "primary organizations," which engaged in organizing people and had characterized the earlier rationalization of the manufacturing sector. Finally, it is significant that agricultural cooperatives did not face direct competition from corporations-corporate farms did not begin to flourish until after World War II (Raup 1973). Had such organizations been common at the height of the anti-chain-store episode, it seems certain that the differences between the agricultural cooperatives and the corporate chains would have been more salient (as they have become in recent decades; see Mintz and Schwartz 1985).…”

Ethnography, Naturalism, and Paul Corey

“…By 1940 Goldschmidt saw the trend of developing overarching, secondary organizations such as universities, experiment stations, extension services, the Farm Credit Administration, statistical reporting, rural electrification, and political organizations such as the Farm Bureau. That infrastructure for industrial agriculture was provided by government policies to transform the family farms of Corey's trilogy into industrial farms of Acres of Antaeus () (Raup ). The urbanization of rural America that Goldschmidt had reported was part of that process.…”

Anti‐Corporate Farming Laws and Industry Structure: The Case of Cattle Feeding

“…If small feedlots are inefficient, and if large Jones, Schermerhorn (1971) predicts a growing role for publicly held corporations because of their capital-raising abilities. Raup (1973) states that "there are types of farming for which capital requirements and economies of size are often beyond the reach of . .…”