Exam 11: Agriculture

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Agribusiness is an encompassing term for a business that has total control over all aspects of farming: including giving the baby chicks to the farmers to raise as well as setting prices. But it also has concentrated agricultural activities,and become more vertically integrated,with the same huge companies owning the farms,the storage facilities,processing plants - and selling the finished products in the stores.The global trading market and many technologies have helped agribusiness grow so big. They control the means of production and they seem to control the markets,too. The majority of chickens and hogs raised for markets in the U.S.,for example,are concentrated in just a few areas of production - chickens in Virginia,Georgia,and Arkansas,with huge concentrations of hog producers in Iowa - mostly controlled by just a few companies in each case. The rural landscape has changed with factory farms taking the place of smaller more dispersed family farms. There are huge grain storage facilities and enormous processing plants,like for beef slaughtering or even ethanol for fuel. Their impacts on the environment are huge,with concentrated manure from a factory farm more like a city's worth of waste than a farm's small impacts.