Farming on a large, factory scale escalated in the United States following World War II. Larger machines already were re-placing laborers who had been moving to the nation’s cities to work in expanding factories and offices. With the weapons needs of the war effort fading, chemical-manufacturing corporations began turning their products into pesticides and synthetic fertilizers for use in agriculture.⁹ Over the course of the late 1960s, ‘70s, and accelerating during the 1980s and ‘90s, shifting federal agriculture policy and the growing power of the agribusiness corporations and traders that control world markets for the major commodity crops –– think corn, wheat, and soybeans, which go into much of our processed food and feed products –– gradually overlaid a production, assembly-line framework onto food and farming. It encourages the employment of labor and time saving machines to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops, and the use of petroleum-based synthetic chemicals to sustain them. Instead of raising livestock, a variety of grain crops, vegetables, and fruit on, say, 200 acres or fewer, farmers sacrificed their farm diversity. In general, they began to focus either on raising thousands of live-stock animals in crammed quarters or on growing a limited variety of corn, soybeans, wheat, and other commodity crops on hundreds or thousands of acres.¹⁰ Large global agribusiness processors such as Cargill then buy the food and feed grain from farmers at low prices.

Farmers have gone along with this idea of get big or get out pushed by government and agribusiness. Indeed, U.S. farm policy has compelled medium-scale and large farms to adopt this industrial model of agriculture. “They’re farming more and more land and producing more and more homogenous commodity crops that the transnational companies can neatly process, package and ship anywhere and everywhere. In this, the latest stage of global, industrial agriculture, farmers are planting genetically modified crops that allow them to work even more land with less effort so that they can go to town to get a job” because they paid high prices for the biotech seed and received less money for their crop from global agribusiness corporations than it cost to produce.” ¹¹

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