| Chapter 1: | ADM, A Tomato Named Local Lucy, and Small Farms: The Ecology and Reemergence of Farmers’ Markets |
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Consolidation at this level means significantly fewer markets for farmers and significantly less competition for the prices farmers receive for their products. The business of agriculture at this scale has negative impacts. Studies of industrial agriculture in the United States indicate that an extremely small number of very large farms and agribusiness firms tend to win, while communities, small farmers, and the environment lose (Bonanno 1994; Goldschmidt 1978; Thu & Durrenberger 1998).
There are also international inequities resulting from the movement of commodity production for Western countries to developing countries. These countries may experience a loss of agricultural self-sufficiency, undermining their food security (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997). To make matters worse, developing countries may, in turn, experience delocalization of their own diet, whereby a significant portion of their traditional diet is substituted by imports from other countries (Pelto & Vargus, 1992). These countries will pay other costs as well. Describing the consequence of a highly industrialized agricultural system, Goldschmidt (1998) pointed out that “it is efficiency driven and unsentimentally profit oriented. It takes no account of hidden costs that ultimately may be borne by the community” (p. 185).
Some visions of the future of farming in the United States paint a bleak picture. A report by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) thoughtfully analyzed the “vertical coordination” of U.S. agriculture (Tweeten & Flora, 2001). It predicts a highly industrialized agriculture integrated vertically and detached from rural communities: