interact withnature, and because adequate
food production and consumption has
proven to be crucial for the stability ofsocial
formations.
Farming as a capitalist enterprise preceded
England’sindustrial revolution,as tenant
farmers began cultivating wool for the nascent
textile industry (seeagricultural revolu-
tion). Since the Second World War, the world
has seen massive transformation of farming
sectors. In the industrialized counties, these
transformations began with the proliferation
of technologies of intensive agriculture,
especially those that relied on the development
of petrochemical inputs; these technologies
were extended to some areas of thethird
world, with the idea that high-yielding
agriculture (see green revolution) and
industrializationwere keys todevelopment
(Goodman and Redclift, 1991). Since the
1980s, however, rural populations have sub-
stantially declined (seeurbanization). The
1970s was a period of farm expansion, owing
to the USA selling massive amounts of grain to
the Soviet Union, which caused a temporary
food shortage and high prices for farmers. The
collapse in prices that followed contributed
to the international debt crises of the 1980s,
which forced many farmers out of business
who could no longer pay the farm mortgages
they acquired in the previous expansion
(Friedmann, 1993). Recent freetradeagree-
ments have allowed low-cost producers, such
as the USA, to dump surplus crops in cash-
poor regions and countries, undermining the
livelihoods ofpeasants and small farmers,
contributing to even more displacement.
Categorizing patterns of farm land use was
a staple feature of traditionalagricultural
geography(Tarrant, 1974). Farm size has
continued to be a major analytic in empirical
studies of farming, owing in part to the avail-
ability of census data, which are often reported
as acres/hectares in production and/or gross
sales. As thepolitical economyof agricul-
turetraditioncame to dominate agricultural
geography in the 1980s, more effort was put
into developing more theoretically informed
typologies of farm business organization and
to help explain changes in farming practice
(see, e.g., Whatmore, Munton, Little and
Mardsen, 1987). These efforts engaged with
a long sociological tradition concerned with
theclasslocation of farmers and the social
organization of farming relative tostateand
capital(see Buttel and Newby, 1980).land
tenure, capital ownership, labour relations,
family life-cycle and rent-seeking thus
became primary analytics, and the persistence
of the family farm, defined as that where
familymembers provide all or most of the
agricultural labour regardless of the extent of
its commercial orientation (cf. subsistence
agriculture) became a central theoretical
question. One widely cited theorization of this
uneven developmentof capitalist agriculture
was Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson (1987).
capitalism has developed around farming,
they argued, because with its basis in land
and biology, farming itself remains risky, while
the processes that serve farming are more eas-
ily commodified and sold back to the farmer
(see agrarian question;substitutionism).
Watts (1994a)drew on these arguments in
his work on contract farming, noting that the
degree to which buyer firms specify required
processes and inputs in their contracts has
made many peasants equivalent to wage
labourers on their own land. Sachs (1996)
added that the enduring family basis of farm-
ing in most parts of the world has in large part
depended on highly gendered divisions of
labour within peasanthouseholds. In some
sectors and regions, however, farming oper-
ations themselves are large-scale, capitalist
enterprises (Heffernan and Constance,
1994). Highly mechanized corporate farms
should be differentiated from plantations
that, while corporately owned and managed
and large in scale, employ many manual
labourers.
In the early 1990s, agro-food scholars began
to take note of divergent trends in farming and
food production. Heightened pubic concern
with food safety and quality, the ecological
effects of agriculture and the changing
countryside (in some cases depopulation, in
others urbanization) seemed to support a turn
towards farming that would be more sensitive
to ecological concerns and protective of rural
livelihoods. In addition, growth in part-time
and hobby farming, a resurgence of back to
the land sensibilities among those seeking
alternative lifestyles, along with a putative
shift in national forms of farm regulation away
from commodity supports seemed to indicate
a ‘post-productivist’ transition in agriculture
(Marsden, 1992). While the dramatic rise in
organics, for example, seems to provide sup-
port for this claim, the European and US
farming sectors are state-supported more
than ever, albeit in different ways to different
ends. Meanwhile, many Third World farming
sectors are producing high-value fruits and
vegetables under conditions ofstructural
adjustment.Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_F Final Proof page 241 31.3.2009 1:20pmFARMING