The Geography of Agriculture in Developed Market Economies

I.R. Bowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317885078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

First published in 1993. The broad objective of this book is to describe and explain the contemporary geography of agriculture in developed market economies. The objective has been approached by a team of agricultural geographers, each writer contributing an analysis of a particular topic.

1

The industrialization of agriculture

Ian Bowler

The main purpose of this chapter is to establish the general characteristics of agriculture under advanced capitalism. The theme concerns the industrialization of agriculture: its interpretation as the ‘third agricultural revolution’, its main features and the ongoing debate on how to theorize its recent development. Later chapters will examine the geography of contemporary agriculture as revealed by different countries, regions and farms; here the discussion centres on gaining a broad overview.

Taking this broad view, the history of world agriculture can be interpreted as long periods of slow, incremental, evolutionary change punctuated by relatively short periods of acccelerated, radical transformation. Troughton (1986) argues that the term ‘revolution’ can be used to describe three periods of particularly rapid change in agriculture, even though the ‘revolutions’ have occurred at various times in different parts of the world. Two comprehensive reviews of the available literature on the first and second of these agricultural revolutions have been completed by Grigg (1974, 1982), while Table 1.1 summarizes and compares the essential features of all three ‘turning points’ in world agricultural development.

Three agricultural revolutions

The first agricultural revolution

Beginning more than 10 000 years ago, this revolution is now associated with the development of seed agriculture, the plough and draught animals. This emphasis tends to devalue the role of vegeculture (plants reproduced by vegetative propagation) in early farming, especially in the tropics, for there is partial evidence that vegeculture preceded seed agriculture in some regions. However, early agriculture is usually associated with the successful selection and domestication of crops and animals such as wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, while the archaeological evidence suggests that only a few regions were involved in originating these developments.

Table 1.1 The three agricultural revolutions

	1. Beginnings and spread	2. Subsistence to market	3. Industrialization
Time	Pre-10 000 BP to 20th century	c. AD 1 650 to present	1928 to present
Key periods	Neolithic. Medieval Europe	18th century England. 19-20th century in ‘European’ settlement areas	Present day
Key areas	Europe and South East Asia	Western Europe and North America	USSR and Eastern Europe. North America and Western Europe
Major goal	Domestic food supply and survival	Surplus production and financial return	Lower unit cost of production
Characteristics	Initial selection and domestication of key species Farming replaces hunting and gathering as way of life and basis of rural settlement and society	Critical improvements, mercantilistic outlook, and food demands of Industrial Revolution, replace subsistence with market orientation	Collective (socialist) and corporate (capitalist) ideologies and common agrotechnology favour integration of agricultural production into total food-industry system
	Agrarian societies proliferate and support population growth Subsistence agriculture: labour intensive, low technology, communal tenure	Agriculture part of sectoral division of labour: individual family farm becomes ‘ideal’ for way of life and for getting a living	Emphasis on productivity and production for profit, replace agrarian structure and farm way of life
		Commercial agriculture develops growing reliance on technological inputs and infrastructure	Collective/ corporate production utilizes economies of scale, capital intensity, labour substitution and specialized production on fewer, larger units
Source: Troughton 1986.

A broad area of South-west Asia, stretching from Greece and Crete in the west to the foothills of the Hindu Kush south of the Caspian Sea in the east, appears to have been particularly influential. Village communities, based on a settled way of life, replaced the earlier nomadic hunting and gathering societies, while flood-plain locations, for example along the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile rivers, became so favoured as to form the basis of complex civilizations.

Other ‘hearths’ for the domestication of crops and animals, and their subsequent diffusion across the continents, have been identified in parts of Central and South America, northern China, the north-east of India and East Africa. Debate continues over the location, timing and independence of origin for many of these ‘hearths’, although it is clear that North America, northern Europe and Australasia were receiving areas for crops and livestock domesticated elsewhere. For example, agriculture did not reach Spain, southern France and the shores of the North Sea until approximately 4000 BC.

The second agricultural revolution

The origins of this revolution have been ascribed by most historians to Western Europe, although again a debate continues over the exact date. For example, some writers favour the period of accelerated urban and economic growth in Western Europe between AD 1000 and 1340; these developments were preceded by a number of innovations in agriculture such as an improved yoke for oxen, three-course rotations and the replacement of the ox by the horse, which together can be interpreted as forming an agricultural revolution. Other writers, especially for English agriculture, favour a later period for the second agricultural revolution and point up the agricultural improvements of the late-sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries as marking a more significant period of accelerated development. A range of new farming practices was introduced, particularly new crop rotations (convertible husbandry) which included grass leys containing legumes (clover, lucerne, sainfoin) and improved varieties of mangel, turnip and swede. Convertible husbandry reduced the need for bare fallows, released land for cultivation, provided pasture and winter fodder for more livestock, renewed soil fertility through the nitrogen-fixing leguminous crops, and increased the supply of animal manure. Other writers have favoured those rapid agricultural changes later in the nineteenth century as comprising the second agricultural revolution. Thompson (1968), for example, writing on British agriculture, cites the 1820s as one of three ‘revolutionary’ phases during which the large-scale purchase of inputs from off the farm began, especially fertilizers (bone meal and imported guano) and animal feed (oilcake), but including field drainage and the construction of new farm buildings.

On a broader scale, and using measures such as crop and livestock yields, labour input and capital formation, it is possible to show that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries comprised the major period of rising agricultural productivity throughout Western Europe (Goodman et al. 1987). Placing the second agricultural revolution in the early decades of the nineteenth century also enables a linkage to be formed with parallel developments in the manufacturing sector which followed the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the industrialization of the broader economy and society in the nineteenth century had a wide range of consequences for agriculture throughout Western Europe, especially through the urbanization of the workforce, the rising demand for food from that population, the improvement of transport systems, as well as the development of new agricultural technologies, including horse-drawn farm machinery. From this perspective, therefore, the creation of a commercial market for food among a growing urban-industrial population was an essential feature of the second agricultural revolution. Even so, Bairoch (1973) maintains the argument that the second agricultural revolution occurred earlier in the seventeenth century, and was subsequently absorbed into the broader social and economic developmental processes that swept Western Europe following the Industrial Revolution.

The focus on agricultural innovations to define the location and timing of a second agricultural revolution can have a number of unfortunate consequences. For example, there is always a time-lag between the initial adoption of an innovation, its spatial diffusion, and consequently its impact on the economic and social organization of a country or region. Thus, while historians such as Ernle and Toynbee may be correct in placing the origins of the second agricultural revolution in eastern England between approximately 1760 and 1815, the wider impact of these developments on other regions of the United Kingdom (UK) came in later years. In addition, innovations tend to focus attention on the inputs to farming rather than the outputs, whereas the latter, especially the productivity of the factors of production (land, labour, capital) can be of equal importance in defining a period of accelerated change. Also, by focusing on technical innovations in farming, attention is drawn away from equally important features of the second agricultural revolution. For example, the ‘revolutionary’ developments in West European farming occurred at a time when the feudal landholding system was being replaced by private property rights. The medieval open fields, with their strip-farming, communal farming practices and common lands, were progressively replaced by enclosed, consolidated, individually owned or tenanted farms, with land given a price in its own right. As Tracy (1982: 8) observes: ‘the [new] structure of agriculture, with large farms and a class of wealthy landowners ready to invest in their estates, made ... farming particularly receptive to technological progress’. The new agrarian system transformed an essentially subsistence or peasant agriculture which had been only partially integrated into a market economy.

While debate continues over the most appropriate date for the second agricultural revolution, few would argue with Grigg (1982: 91) that ‘the nineteenth century marked the most profound break in the long history of agriculture, when industrialization and urbanization transformed the rural world and revolutionized agriculture’. From its origins in Western Europe, the new, commercialized system of farming was diffused by European colonization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to other parts of the world (Peet 1969). A dominant agrarian model of commercial, capitalist farming was established, based on a structure of numerous, relatively small family farms, and from this period can be traced both the dependence of agriculture on manufacturing industry for many farm inputs, and the increasing productivity of farm labour which released large numbers of workers from the land to swell the ranks of factory workers and city dwellers. Moreover, the production of food surplus to domestic demand enabled international patterns of agricultural trade to be established.

The third agricultural revolution

Like its predecessor, this revolution can be subdivided into a number of developmental phases. The terms ‘mechanization’, ‘chemical farming’ and ‘food manufacturing’ are used to describe the rapid agricultural changes that have successively swept through agriculture in developed countries over the last 50 years. Each phase appears to have had its origins in North America, later being diffused to other economies; for example, the first petrol-driven tractor was built in the United States (US) in 1892, the first manufacturing plant was opened in 1907, while the tractor progressively replaced the horse in the 1920s and 1930s. In Europe, by comparison, the widespread adoption of the tractor was delayed until the years following the Second World War. Chemical farming - the use of inorganic fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides (agrichemicals) - developed in the US in the 1950s and in Europe in the 1960s, although pesticides based on derris and pyrethrum were in use in the late nineteenth century. The origins of the third phase- food manufacturing- can be traced to the 1960s in North America and the 1970s in Europe, so that today almost all foodstuffs are subjected to some ‘value-added’ treatment off the farm before reaching the consumer. Whereas the first two developmental phases were associated with mechanical and biological inputs to farming, and brought about the internal ‘modernization’ of farm businesses, the third phase is more concerned with the outputs from farming, and the external relations between farm businesses and firms involved with the processing and manufacturing of food. Taken together, all three phases have brought about the ‘industrialization of agriculture’ and they are described in more detail in the following section.

The meaning of the ‘industrialization of agriculture’

The term ‘industrialization of agriculture’ more accurately describes the processes of change in the most recent transformation of agriculture, rather than the actual physical condition of agricultural production itself. The composite of features normally associated with manufacturing industry are found in only a few farming systems, for example horticulture and intensive livestock, but the processes leading to the acquisition of those characteristics are present in many sectors of capitalist agriculture. Indeed Troughton (1986) draws attention to the acquisition of similar characteristics by agriculture in the USS...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The industrialization of agriculture
• 2 Data sources for studying agriculture
• 3 Factors of production in modern agriculture
• 4 The agricultural significance of farm size and land tenure
• 5 Farm types and agricultural regions
• 6 Changing farm enterprises
• 7 Marketing agricultural produce
• 8 Agriculture as a resource system
• 9 Agriculture and the state
• 10 Farming at the urban fringe
• Conclusion
• Index