Farms

Farms

  • Submitted By: JJ5227
  • Date Submitted: 10/30/2008 4:58 PM
  • Category: Miscellaneous
  • Words: 1023
  • Page: 5
  • Views: 713

Family Farms

When the twentieth century started over 40 percent of the people in the United States were still farmers and well over half of them still lived out in the country. A hundred years later, less than two percent of people in the United States call themselves farmers. The number of farms in the country was greatest during the 1930s; and since then it has dropped dramatically. Even the families living on farms today earn over half of their income from sources other than farming.
During the twentieth century, America turned from an agricultural nation to an industrial nation. The industrial age led to specialization in curtain areas. This specialization allowed the method of production to be routinely done, and some were mechanized. (For example Henry Ford and the assemble line.) Thus, control of production could be handled by fewer people making decisions. I believe that American agriculture has followed the industrialization method just like most things have. Farming operations have gradually become more specific, because specializing in raising livestock and growing crops or by specializing in certain crops or species of livestock.
Corporate farms have divided the role that was once performed by a farmer and his family on their farm, into a number of specific roles that are done by separate corporate farms all across the country. On Corporate farms, there is the management someone else owns the land others provide the money needed to operate and there are others that do the work. Publicly owned corporations are able to come up with huge amounts of money from all over the country. This gives them almost unlimited ability in financing a successful farm. So today, agriculture is mainly controlled by corporations because they have the money and buying power to buy up all the family farms. But that doesn’t mean they should.
In agriculture today, some people are landowners, some people are workers, and some people own stock in...

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