Agribusiness

There are two connotations for the term “agribusiness.” In a more general sense, the word is used to identify the integrated and diverse components of modern crop production, including the actual grower, but also many others: silo operators; fertilizer, seed, and farm implement salespeople; agricultural technicians; and others involved in agricultural production. When used this way, the word is inclusive of all aspects of modern agricultural economics, including the marketing and advertising of agricultural commodities, and is not focused simply on production techniques and methods. In a more specific sense, the term may be used interchangeably with the phrases “industrial farming,” “corporate farming,” or “factory farming.” In this context, “agribusiness” means the application of mass production techniques to farming along with the advent of large agricultural units, typically under corporate ownership. Production in this system relies on achieving economies of scale, either through the acquisition and combination of farmland into larger parcels (for crop production), or through the concentration of animals into high-density facilities, where feeding, breeding, and processing costs are minimized (for livestock production).

Agribusiness in the sense of factory farming is a widespread phenomenon in the agricultural ecology of the industrialized world and may be seen as a continuation of the agricultural revolution initiated in Great Britain in the early 1700s. The most obvious spatial manifestations of agribusiness are extensive farms, and animal husbandry methods utilizing high-density units like poultry houses, hog parlors, or other so-called Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, a designation assigned in the United States by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since the 1940s, shifts in many areas of agriculture have occurred, resulting in larger, more intensively utilized production units. For example, in 1970, the average dairy farm in the United States had 19 cows, but by 2007 that number had risen to 128 cows per farm. In some regions, particularly in western states, the increase was much larger than the national average. The overall size of farms has increased substantially as well. The size of the average farmin the United States increased from about 150 acres in the 1930s to more than 400 acres in 2002, although the total number of farms in the United States has decreased steadily since the 1940s. Nevertheless, non-family farms, that is, those corporately owned, account for only about two percent of all farms in the country, although the corporate farms produce almost 14 percent of total agricultural output by value. Moreover, corporate farming is particularly important in the production of meat and animal products. A handful of corporations slaughter the great majority of livestock in the United States, and in the case of beef, account for more than 80 percent of the output.