The cycle in CA pretty much looks like this - massive livestock ranches broken up into far far smaller independent (if not "traditional" northeastern and midwestern "family" farms) units growing everything from vegetables to fruit and nuts to dairy and cattle subsequently reconcentrated in the context of water politics and opportunities to profit from high-value (not staple) crops.
Also, there are only direct federal subsidies for historically overproduced staple crops and dairy - never for fruits, nuts and vegetables, the keys to California agribusiness. Furthermore, the focus on making profits in agriculture varies greatly across the country for, again, a wide variety of reasons. There remain, even today, large numbers of fairly small farms where agricultural production is continued for reasons of identity more than profitability - at least in significant part because its not profitable... the majority of farm income is earned off the farm. Additionally, the growth in agribusiness was driven more by overproduction and concentration in agricultural processing industries... a factor that drove farmers, getting ever small shares of agricultural income, to grow in size given the need to increase gross production in the face of falling net income due to overproduction... NOT because they wanted to grow. Additionally, in IN, IL, MI and WI farmers of German Catholic descent have long been willing to suffer longer on the farm and make pluriactive efforts to stay on the farm relative to their English Protestant neighbors, a cultural factor that (unevenly) facilitated the growth of the formers' farms.
There's nothing more variable than agriculture and this conversation's flush with really problematic attempts to homogenize the sector.
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:
> At 11:04 AM 10/14/2010, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
>
> Why is it a stretch? Have you looked at the history?
>>
>
> Yeah. Your premise is agribusiness edged out family farms. That doesn't
> fit with California, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, agribusiness
> complexes in the world, where there were no family farms to edge out.
>
> And if it's so profitable and great why does it need gazillions in
>> subsidies and why is the product so bloody awful?
>>
>
> Because they're not in the business of making food, but in making money.
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319