Industrialization of U.S. Agriculture: An Interpretive Atlas by Howard F Gregor & Taylor & Francis Group

Author:Howard F Gregor & Taylor & Francis Group [Gregor, Howard F & Taylor & Group, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367018894
Google: 4Sy8zgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 59721440
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

SCALE OF LABOR CAPITALIZATION

Labor, no less than land, has been a favorite criterion among investigators of the large industrialized farm. Yet, as noted earlier, the labor indicator runs afoul the problems of determining the minimum labor requirements of such a farm and obtaining sufficient data. By observing the areal distribution of the amount of labor expenditures per farm and comparing the pattern with that of intensity of labor expenditures, we may at least avoid these problems to the extent of determining where farms with heavy labor outlays are most concentrated. We shall also be advancing another step in our attempt to outline the distribution of what I have proposed as a more direct and comprehensive indicator of agricultural industrialization: the process itself.

The western part of the country is easily the most prominent area of labor capitalization by farm (Fig. 3.2). However, there is an an even more pronounced westward shift within the area itself, with a noticeable reduction of the Great Plains counties included in the highest category of labor expenditures per farm (over $7,300) and a broad extension into the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. All Pacific states now have massive majorities of their territories in the Class I group; Alaska, for the first and only time in our consideration of the sixteen intensity and scale variables posited for agricultural industrialization, shows all of its statistical reporting units ranking above the national median ($5,000 per farm). Alaska also best illustrates the influence of isolation from major labor markets, a serious problem for much of the West. Here, in a location more removed from the national heartland than any other area except Hawaii, farm wage rates are high enough to place the majority of its farms in the top class of labor capitalization despite their predominantly modest size (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2) and very low labor capitalization intensity (Fig. 2.2). Farther south, in the other states of the Pacific area, high wage rates again greatly bolster the rankings of the predominantly small farms in scale of labor capitalization, though the much more intensive farming and the great scale of operations among the largest farms add their bit.

In the eastern part of the nation, the most obvious difference between the distributions of scale of land and building capitalization and labor capitalization is the reversal of the ranking of the Great Lakes region and particularly the Northeast relative to the Corn Belt. The high positions of the first two areas is especially noteworthy, considering the modest farm sizes. But unlike Alaska, the high wage rates here, in the densest labor concentration of the country, are more the result of the intense competition between the demands of intensive dairying and specialty cropping and those of the many and large industrial centers. The strong underlying role of the urban areas in this competition is quite evident in the Class I counties clustering in the major metropolitan areas of Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, culminating in the almost unbroken strip of extensive labor scale extending from Washington, D.

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