Dictionary:

agriculture

  (ăg'rĭ-kŭl'chər)

The science, art, and business of cultivating soil, producing crops, and raising livestock; farming.

[Middle English, from Latin agrīcultūra : agrī, genitive of ager, field + cultūra, cultivation; see culture.]

The art and science of crop and livestock production. In its broadest sense, agriculture comprises the entire range of technologies associated with the production of useful products from plants and animals, including soil cultivation, crop and livestock management, and the activities of processing and marketing. The term agribusiness has been coined to include all the technologies that mesh in the total inputs and outputs of the farming sector. In this light, agriculture encompasses the whole range of economic activities involved in manufacturing and distributing the industrial inputs used in farming; the farm production of crops, animals, and animal products; the processing of these materials into finished products; and the provision of products at a time and place demanded by consumers.

Many different factors influence the kind of agriculture practiced in a particular area. Among these are climate, soil, water availability, topography, nearness to markets, transportation facilities, land costs, and general economic level. Climate, soil, water availability, and topography vary widely throughout the world. This variation brings about a wide range in agricultural production enterprises. Certain areas tend toward a specialized agriculture, whereas other areas engage in a more diversified agriculture. As new technology is introduced and adopted, environmental factors are less important in influencing agricultural production patterns. Continued growth in the world's population makes critical the continuing ability of agriculture to provide needed food and fiber.

The primary agricultural products consist of crop plants for human food and animal feed and livestock products. The crop plants can be divided into 10 categories: grain crops (wheat, for flour to make bread, many bakery products, and breakfast cereals; rice, for food; maize, for livestock feed, syrup, meal, and oil; sorghum grain, for livestock feed; and oats, barley, and rye, for food and livestock feed); food grain legumes (beans, peas, lima beans, and cowpeas, for food; and peanuts, for food and oil); oil seed crops (soybeans, for oil and high-protein meal; and linseed, for oil and high-protein meal); root and tuber crops (principally potatoes and sweet potatoes); sugar crops (sugarbeets and sugarcane); fiber crops (principally cotton, for fiber to make textiles and for seed to produce oil and high-protein meal); tree and small fruits; nut crops; vegetables; and forages (for support of livestock pastures and range grazing lands and for hay and silage crops). The forages are dominated by a wide range of grasses and legumes, suited to different conditions of soil and climate.

Livestock products include cattle, for beef, tallow, and hides; dairy cattle, for milk, butter, cheese, ice cream, and other products; sheep, for mutton (lamb) and wool; pigs, for pork and lard; poultry (chiefly chickens but also turkeys and ducks) for meat and eggs; and horses, primarily for recreation. See also Poultry production; Sheep.

Definition: farming
Antonyms: industry

Is not a concept the Supreme Court uses to decide cases. Rather, agriculture is a context from which cases arise. From 1790 to 1860, through disputes involving agricultural lands, the Court rendered decisions establishing the sovereignty (Fremont v. United States, 1854) and private ownership of the American land base (United States v. Noe, 1859). Litigation between inventors of agricultural implements gave rise to early interpretations of the Constitution's patents clause (Seymour v. McCormick, 1854).

After the Civil War, agricultural products were the basis of a flourishing commerce. As this commerce grew, state legislatures passed statutes governing elevators, railroads, and packers. These measures stirred profound debate in the Supreme Court from 1873 to 1940. One set of justices believed that states had constitutional authority through their police power to protect the public's health, safety, and welfare. These justices accepted state statutes licensing livestock butchers (Slaughterhouse Cases, 1873) or grain storage (Payne v. Kansas, 1918). They also approved the regulation of rates charged by elevators (Munn v. Illinois, 1877) and minimum and maximum retail prices for milk (Nebbia v. New York, 1934). Another set of justices believed that these state statutes contravened the Fourteenth Amendment'sdue process, equal protection, and privileges and immunities clauses. These justices invoked the Fourteenth Amendment to protect American citizens from state monopoly franchises (Slaughterhouse Cases, 1884), confiscatory rate regulations (Brass v. North Dakota, 1894), and differential licensing standards among agricultural processors (Frost v. Oklahoma Corporation Commission, 1929). Although the context shifted from agricultural commerce after 1940, the debate about the interplay between state police power and the Fourteenth Amendment persisted (seeCommerce Power).

The Supreme Court often addressed matters of agriculture when determining congressional authority over American commerce. The justices have held that states can protect their internal agriculture from contagious diseases (Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway Co. v. Haber, 1898; Mintz v. Baldwin, 1933), but that they cannot isolate themselves from interstate trade and competition (Lemke v. Farmers' Grain Co., 1922; Baldwin v. G.A.F. Seelig, Inc., 1935). Simultaneously, as a government of delegated powers, Congress can only regulate interstate commerce. In the process of defining agricultural interstate commerce, the Court made several of its most momentous rulings.

Initially, the Supreme Court perceived agriculture susceptible to federal power when it was in the stream of commerce between states (Stafford v. Wallace, 1922), but not before it entered that stream (Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. McKendree, 1905). As the Depression deepened in 1933, however, the Court had to reevaluate its position in light of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). Both laws expanded federal power over commerce through administrative agencies. In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935) and United States v. Butler (1936), the Supreme Court ruled the two laws unconstitutional.

In Schechter, the Supreme Court expressed concern that Congress delegated legislative power to administrative agencies without proper standards for bureaucratic action (see Delegation of Powers). Congress responded by enacting the second Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1938. The Court upheld the new law because Congress had set substantive standards to govern the Department of Agriculture (Mulford v. Smith, 1939). Moreover, in a series of cases beginning in 1936 (St. Joseph Stock Yards Co. v. United States) and ending in 1941 (United States v. Morgan), the Court developed doctrines of procedural fairness to govern the Department of Agriculture's administrative actions.

In Butler, the Court ruled that an agricultural tax to bring production in line with demand unconstitutionally invaded state power over intrastate commerce. By early 1942, however, the Court upheld federal regulation of intrastate milk, directly affecting interstate commerce (United States v. Wrightwood Dairy). Later in 1942, the Court, in Wickard v. Filburn, adopted the expansive substantial economic effect test to determine when Congress can control intrastate commerce. Wickard remains the leading constitutional case approving sweeping federal power to govern American agriculture through the Commerce Clause.

For five decades after Wickard, agriculture rarely provided the context for important Supreme Court decisions. Agriculture provided the context for the state action exemption to federal antitrust laws (Parker v. Brown, 1943), for the definition of investment contracts under securities law (Securities and Exchange Commission v. Howey [1946]), and a major case determining the extent of federal common law (United states v. Kimbell Foods, Inc., 1979). With three cases in fifty years, the Supreme Court harvest from agricultural cases appeared complete. Beginning in the 1990s, however, agriculture provided fertile ground for Supreme Court action.

The Supreme Court used agricultural market promotion programs (“check‐off” funds) to address the First Amendment right to be free from compelled speech to which the individual citizen (agricultural producer) objects. (Compare Glickman v. Wileman Bros. & Elliott, Inc., 1997 with United States v. United Foods, Inc., 2001.) The Supreme Court endorsed strong intellectual property rights in patents for corn plants and corn seeds, thereby promoting agricultural biotechnology (J.E.M. Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi‐Bred International, Inc., 2001).

In a twist of fate as the twenty‐first century begins, agriculture may present the Supreme Court with cases in which to address the scope of congressional power under the Commerce Clause—a power that Wickard approved so broadly sixty years ago. As environmental laws begin to apply fully to farming and ranching, agriculture may become the context in which the Supreme Court defines yet again the delegated powers of Congress (commerce, taxation, spending) and how these powers relate to the constitutional structure of federalism. The Supreme Court appears poised to address fundamental constitutional precedent from agricultural cases.

See also Capitalism.

— Drew L. Kershen

For more information on agriculture, visit Britannica.com.

The decreased role of agriculture in American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century masks the extent to which farming has often shaped the national experience. Agriculture, at the very least, features an impressively lengthy heritage. The first American farmers were Native Americans who cultivated indigenous and Mesoamerican plants in excess of seven thousand years ago. Amer Indian agriculture evolved according to environmental, technological, and cultural imperatives. In the South, river valleys and floodplains attracted early farming endeavors. Squash was planted in the Lower Tennessee River valley over four thousand years ago. In sub-sequent years, southern tribes developed sophisticated intercropping skills based around complementing one crop with another. Beans and corn proved an ideal mix, beans providing valuable soil nutrients (such as nitrogen) required by corn, while cornstalks served as convenient climbing vehicles for beans.

Agricultural pursuits varied by region. In the Upper Great Lakes, Ojibwa and Assiniboine nations sowed wild rice in fertile marshlands. The slight interest in horticulture on the Great Plains reflected the dominance of hunting pursuits. From the eighth century onwards, corn represented the most widespread agricultural product in the aboriginal economy. In the Southwest, Anasazi farmers developed their own hybrid corn from chapalote and maize de ocho. Native Americans also pioneered irrigated agriculture. In the Salt and Gila Valleys, the Hohokam dug (and successfully maintained) irrigation canals up to seventy-five feet across. Two canals measuring over ten miles in length watered fields near today's Phoenix.

Colonial Agriculture

The first European farmers drew on indigenous wisdom in order to survive. Prepared for gold-searching rather than subsistence farming, early residents of Jamestown, Virginia, relied on local Indian knowledge of planting to circumvent starvation. Settlers learned how to cultivate corn and tobacco. The pilgrims of the fledgling Plymouth Colony similarly discovered the wonders of maize. As the Massachusetts Bay Colony expanded, pioneers introduced cows, horses, and sheep to the eastern landscape. With few sheds and little fencing, livestock initially ran wild. Most early colonists were city gentry, religious dissenters, or indentured servants—all with little experience of farming. Tools proved basic, with the hoe, axe, and scythe the most common implements. Those who were fortunate enough to own plows made money by working the fields of their neighbors. Fresh immigrants sought out Indian clearings for crop cultivation rather than expend significant time on tree felling and heavy brush clearance. While a few regions, such as the Connecticut River valley and the Hudson River area, proved ideal for agriculture, thin and rocky soil compromised crop productivity on the eastern seaboard. Most farmers migrated to fresh terrain when soils became depleted rather than develop sustainable agricultural systems. The sheer abundance of land lent itself to this practice, with more territory always available for cultivation. The taking of Indian land occasionally provoked violent confrontation. In 1676, tormented by Indian attacks and crop failures, Nathaniel Bacon led a vigilante group of servants and small farmers to exact revenge on local Native American communities. Governor William Berkeley, who challenged the rebellion, was placed under house arrest.

Easily grown and requiring no machinery to process, corn served as the staple food crop in the fledgling colonial economy. Meanwhile, tobacco emerged as a key trade commodity. The first English tobacco was grown in Virginia in 1613. A smoking craze in western Europe encouraged colonists to continually increase their production of tobacco for export. Virginia farmers so focused on the weed that colonial governors issued regulations warning residents to plant some food crops for subsistence. In 1628, production surpassed 550,000 pounds. In the absence of harvesting machinery, tobacco, along with other crops, depended on ample manual labor. At first, indentured servants filled the niche in the fast-expanding tobacco fields of Virginia and Maryland, as well as in the rice fields of South Carolina. However, servitude gave way to slavery. By 1700, southern agriculture was already dependent on a slave economy.

During the 1700s, established New England agriculturalists experimented with more specialized forms of production. Animal husbandry developed in response to needs for draft horses to pull wagons and quality meat for town dwellers. German American farmers bred the much-lauded Conestoga breed of draft horse. By furnishing all manner of grains for consumption in the fast-expanding cities of the Atlantic seaboard, as well as for export abroad, New Jersey and Pennsylvania farmers earned their colonies the reputation of breadbasket kingdoms. Meanwhile, in the South, plantation owners reaped successive financial harvests from a single-crop economy based on exploitative labor. In 1708, tobacco exports reached 30 million pounds. On the eve of the American Revolution, the figure surpassed 100 million.

Farming in the New Republic

During the American Revolution, agriculture proved essential in keeping both armies fighting. Farmers responded to war by increasing their production of cattle, fruit, and crops. A female labor force filled roles previously occupied by men. Shortages usually came about as a result of troop movements and transportation problems rather than agricultural shortfalls. Both sides drew on the lofty image of owning one's own farm to recruit men for war duties, offering acres of land to those who volunteered.

The victorious United States was, first and foremost, an agricultural nation. Having procured a farm in New York, French commentator J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, writing immediately after the Revolution, explained how "this formerly rude soil has been converted by my father into a pleasant farm, and in return, it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as inhabitants of such a district" (Letters from an American Farmer [1782]). In Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Thomas Jefferson expounded his idea of a virtuous agrarian nation by claiming that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." Agriculture united men of differing classes and persuasions, appealing to both the rugged frontiersman and the dignified gentleman—the latter finding outlet in the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (1785) and the South Carolina Society for Promoting and Improving Agriculture and Other Rural Concerns (1785). Farming was a way of life. The 1810 census recorded a total population of 7.2 million Americans, 90 percent of whom lived on farms.

Successive land acts—most notably the Land Survey Ordinance of 1785 and the Land Act of 1796—set in motion the transfer of the public domain to private hands. Land was survey ed, parceled into townships, and auctioned. However, a minimum purchase of 640 acres, at first priced at one dollar, then increased to two, proved beyond the reach of the average farmer. Land speculators benefited most from the distribution system, while squatting on unclaimed tracts became popular with poorer farmers. Geometric parcels, the infamous grid system, hardly abided by landscape topography or suited river access. When sales proved disappointing, the government instituted credit reforms and reduced the minimum acreage to 160 acres.

Farming expanded west of the Appalachians during the late 1700s. The Ohio River valley, with its rich soil and timber resources, invited settlement. However, frontier farming proved far from easy. Migrant families arrived at their wilderness purchase with few animals, tools, or financial resources. Densely forested land required extensive clearing. Agricultural technology remained primitive, with the time-honored plough, the sickle, the hoe, and the axe physically testing the endurance and the resolve of the agrarian pioneer. The transporting of goods was limited by dirt roads and changeable weather conditions. When it rained, roadways disappeared beneath mud and surface water. Farmers set their sights on quick improvements to properties before selling out to purchase a larger acreage. Successful frontier farming depended on good soil and a dedicated family. From an early age, children contributed to the home economy from milking to harvesting. Country stores proved important suppliers of all manner of items from tea and coffee to gunpowder and pottery.

Having exhausted soils in Georgia and the Carolinas, southern plantation owners joined small-scale farmers in moving into Alabama, Mississippi, and western Georgia in the early 1800s. The wealthiest plantation holders purchased vast swathes of land; poorer farmers were often left with marginal plots. Cotton became a staple crop of the South with the invention of the mechanized cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793. The machine separated valuable cotton fiber from unwanted seed. In 1811, output of cotton in the South exceeded 80 million pounds.

The antebellum period was marked by new technologies, increasing commercialization and specialization, geographical expansion, and transportation innovation. Much-improved transport routes aided New England farmers. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 allowed grain to be moved at far cheaper cost. While initially charging twenty-two dollars per ton for travel, by 1835 the cost of canal transport had dropped to just four dollars. The Cumberland or National Road, starting at Cumberland, Maryland, reached Vandalia, Illinois, in 1841. Westerly migration continued unabated, with the farming frontier extending to Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa in the north and Texas in the south. Pioneers took to raising cattle for beef in Ohio and parts of Kentucky. As industrializing cities attracted many rural migrants, northern farmers welcomed developments in labor-saving agricultural machinery. John Deere engineered the steel moldboard plow in 1837 (dubbed the "singing plow" for the whining noise it produced when cutting), a tool much valued on the midwestern prairie with its rough sod. Agricultural societies and fairs proliferated. Nonetheless, farming endeavors in the United States were divided according to two types of agricultural system: small-scale farming in the North and the plantation in the South.

Postbellum Agriculture in the South and the North

The testing climate of the Civil War highlighted inadequacies in southern agriculture. Not only was farmland wrecked by conflict and slash-and-burn techniques, but structural deficiencies came to the fore. Transport systems were shown to be deficient and southern agriculture lacked a diversity of products. White planters suddenly found themselves without a labor force. The reconstruction of southern agriculture proved difficult. Freed slaves relished the idea of having their own farm, a project taken up by the government under the auspices of the Southern Homestead Act (1866). However, available public land was generally of poor quality, while freedmen lacked the money necessary for forest clearance, housing, and planting. Only four thousand claimants applied for plots under the act and the measure was repealed ten years later. Systems of tenancy gradually emerged in the postbellum South. Sharecropping involved the lease of typically twenty to forty acres (along with tools and housing) by a landowner to a working family. In return, the family forfeited a proportion (usually half) of its crop. Merchants and landowners loaned cash or supplies to sharecroppers who had little money to pay for basic living expenses. In practice, revenue from the harvest frequently failed to cover repayments, and many sharecroppers found themselves with spiraling debts. White landowners grew to exercise levels of control similar to the pre–Civil War era. Cotton production dominated the southern landscape, aided by high prices (rising to forty-three cents a pound) in the late 1860s. Even when prices dropped to ten cents a pound in the mid-1870s, output continued to rise. By 1890, production had reached 8 million bales a year.

In the North, increased markets and the absence of significant wartime disruption allowed farmers to repay debts and improve their landholdings. Land prices soared, rising in Iowa from twelve dollars an acre in 1860 to twenty-five dollars ten years later. Agriculture became more mechanized, with new plows and reapers taking advantage of farm horses. Regional specialization proceeded apace as farmers were forced to become more competitive and efficient. Facing foreign and domestic competition, many sheep raisers abandoned marginal lands to take up jobs in the swelling cities. Dairying and fruit growing became increasingly popular in New England, aided by high prices, urban demand, and innovations in refrigeration technology.

The government maintained a keen interest in the agricultural sector during this period. After lobbying from the U.S. Agricultural Society (1852), Congress established the Department of Agriculture in 1862 (raised to cabinet level in 1889). Isaac Newton, who had previously served the agricultural division of the Patent Office, assumed the mantle of first commissioner. During the same year, the Land-Grant College Act (or Morrill Act) allotted public land to individual states for the purpose of establishing agricultural colleges. Federal and state agencies became involved in information gathering, regulation, and scientific research. In 1884, the Bureau of Animal Industry was established to curb imports of diseased animals and to work towards the eradication of Texas fever, a cattle affliction spread by ticks. The Hatch Act of 1887 offered federal support to agricultural experiment stations linked to land grant colleges. (The first station had been established in 1875 at Wesley an University in Middletown, Connecticut.) Scientists studied insect disease, dairy production techniques, and plant breeding and hybridization. The late 1800s also saw the strengthening of farmers associations, who sought to influence state and federal policy in matters of animal health as well as price subsidies and credit payments. Formed in 1867, the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry explored cooperative ventures, demanded lower railroad tariffs and banking rates, and lobbied for gender equality. The Farmers' Alliance exerted an influence over federal agricultural policies in the 1880s, but it was largely subsumed under the People's Party's 1892 platform of economic intervention, nationalization of railroads, and agricultural assistance. After a lackluster performance in the 1896 election, the populist movement dissipated, though farmers' associations continued to draw support. In 1902, Texan Isaac Newton Gresham established the Farmer's Educational and Cooperative Union. Later known as the National Farmers' Union, the organization gained popularity on the Great Plains and in the Midwest.

The Conquest of the West

The first government agents and army scouts to cross the Mississippi spoke of a barren area entirely unfit for agriculture. In 1810, Zebulon Pike defined the Great Plains—the undulating sea of grass that stretched from longitude 100© west to the Rocky Mountains—by its aridity. The report accompanying Major Stephen Long's 1820 expedition described the region as "a dreary plain, wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence." Long's famous phrase, the "Great American Desert," passed into the popular vernacular and was featured on maps of the United States for many years after. Accustomed to temperate eastern climes, travelers to the High Plains appeared shocked by its lack of trees, sparse vegetation, and seasonal extremes. Traditional agriculture did not seem possible in this semi-arid environment.

However, another image took hold in the American mind, one that rendered agriculture instrumental to the settlement of the West in the 1800s. Inspired by Jefferson's agrarian vision for the United States, and informed by the ideology of Manifest Destiny, citizens began to regard the West as a garden, a pastoral paradise for the taking. One of the first to publicize this idea was explorer John Frémont, who insisted that agriculture could flourish on the plains. Similar advertisements abounded in railroad publications from the 1860s. Many believed that bringing the plains under cultivation would encourage moisture; in the famous expression of the time, "rain would follow the plow."

Interest in the West following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 focused on its valuable fur trade, other trading opportunities, and minerals. In the 1830s, emigrants established farms in Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley. The Mormons pioneered irrigated agriculture by diverting streams and building canals in Salt Lake City from the late 1840s. In California, a produce economy grew up around San Francisco and the Central Valley servicing Gold Rush mining towns with wheat, wine, and fruit. However, these represented localized pockets of agricultural activity. Of a total 1.5 million American farmers in 1850, only 119,000 tended lands west of the Mississippi.

It was the passing of attractive land laws that enticed Americans and Europeans to the West in number. Land and prosperity were connected under the Homestead Act of 1862, legislation allotting 160 acres of "free land" to citizens over the age of twenty-one who had never fought against the United States. (The latter provision was dropped in 1866 to allow ex-Confederates to file claims.) Title was granted after five years of cultivation or payment could be commuted after six months at $1.25 an acre. Fifty-seven percent of farms on the frontier were established under the Homestead Act. Settlers also purchased plots at auction or from land speculators.

Beginning in the late 1860s, families stacked their belongings into wagons and headed west in droves. Kansas, the Dakotas, and Nebraska attracted more than 430,000 land claims before 1895. Between 1896 and 1920, the homestead boom spanned Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The first homesteads were built in streambeds and along rivers. After these prized lots were taken, settlers staked claims on the prairie. Faced with a dearth of wood and water, farmers built houses from sod and dug wells. Many settlers planted corn or wheat as cash crops and kept a small vegetable plot or garden. However, customary agricultural practices proved ill suited to western terrain. Less corn grew on 160 acres in west Kansas than on 40 acres in Illinois. Contending with a lack of tools, limited labor, and occasional plagues of grasshoppers, many first-generation farmers elected to go back east or push on to the Pacific. The agrarian dream nonetheless had a powerful allure, and there were always sod busters willing to try their luck on the prairie.

Great Plains farmers learned to adapt. Many remedied the lack of timber for fencing by planting Osage orange hedges. Mennonites from Germany introduced Turkey Red Wheat, a hardy variety that withstood harsh prairie winters. In the 1870s, Colorado landowners led by George Washington Swink tapped water from the Arkansas River to grow cantaloupes and sugar beets. Technological advances aided the western farmer. Wind pumps, barbed wire, grain drills, sulky plows, and mechanical reapers improved productivity and labor efficiency. The railroad brought a revolution in transportation, allowing farmers to gain supplies and ship their products to market swiftly and easily. Some even believed that the steel wires of the railroad encouraged rain. Heavy rains indeed fell west of longitude 97© west between 1878 and 1887, bringing with them a flood of hopeful farmers.

Although cattle had been raised at Spanish missions since the 1700s and pioneers such as William Sublette had brought steers to Wyoming in the 1830s, the cattle kingdom rose to dominance in the western economy only after the Civil War. The industry began in Texas, where enterprising outfits such as the XIT Ranch capitalized on the availability of grassland and the abundance of longhorn cattle (some 5 million by 1866) to build a successful ranching economy. Cattle freely roamed the range until the spring and fall roundups, when cowpunchers drove herds to railheads, bound for the Chicago stockyards. Some 10 million animals were driven out of Texas between 1865 and 1890. By The 1870s, the cattle industry had spread across the Central and Northern Plains. As demand for higher quality meat increased, shorthorns and herefords replaced the scrawny but resilient longhorns. The open range gave way to closed pasture in the 1880s following the invention of barbed wire and escalating land feuds between homesteaders and cattlemen.

The late 1800s brought a time of depression for the agricultural economy of the West. Homesteaders faced problems of overproduction and falling market prices. Between 1866 and 1894 wheat prices fell from $2.06 a bushel to just 49 cents. The summers of 1886 and 1894 were among the driest on record. Many farmers faced starvation and destitution. Between 1890 and 1900, the number of farms in western Kansas declined from 14,300 to 8,900. Life was equally desperate for ranchers. Over-stocking of the open range caused prices to plummet, and when the blizzards of 1887 hit, up to 85 percent of the cattle perished. Writing in 1901, William D. Johnson of the U.S. Geological Survey called the settlement of the Great Plains an "experiment in agriculture on a vast scale. It nevertheless ended in total failure."

Much of the trans-Mississippi region had been brought into cultivation by 1900. Wheat proliferated east of the Rockies, cattle and sheep grazed the intermountain West, and speciality crops grew on Pacific slopes. With the majority of western lands receiving less than twenty inches of rainfall a year, successful agriculture remained dependent on irrigation. The federal government played a crucial role in making the environment more suitable for farming. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 allotted free title to 160 acres if one quarter of that area was planted with trees, while the Desert Land Act of 1877 gave 640 acres to settlers who agreed to water their land, although such measures were sometimes rendered ineffective by fraud. Recognizing a need for the federal government to help organize water projects, Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, a landmark scheme that assigned the Reclamation Service (later the Bureau of Reclamation) the task of overseeing reclamation projects. Seen as second only in significance to the Homestead Act, the Newlands Act irrigated the West through a series of dams along watercourses including the Salt River in Arizona and the Truckee and Carson Rivers in Nevada. By 1924, federal projects had watered 1.2 million acres in the region.

From Golden Age to Disaster

Government irrigation programs, technological innovation, a strong export economy, and a growing urban population delivered a golden age to American farmers in the early years of the twentieth century. Public confidence ran high, as did prices for agricultural products. World War I provided a further boost to grain, stock, and cotton markets. Land became a valuable commodity, the price of farm lots doubling in Iowa between 1914 and 1920. Meanwhile, Congress sought to address the limitations of the original Homestead Act, increasing allotments for western crop and animal producers to 640 acres under the Kinkaid Act of 1904, the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, and the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916.

The early 1900s witnessed a commercial revolution in American agriculture. Technological improvements increased efficiency and productivity. Some 17,000 tractors were produced annually by 1917. That year, Henry Ford unveiled the Fordson, a maneuverable tractor affordable to the small farmer at $750. Farmers became increasingly adept at managing crops and animals to maximize output. Scientists genetically altered corn to breed a more productive hybrid seed. Advances in veterinary science resulted in the near elimination of tick fever in cattle by 1914. The American landscape increasingly bore the hallmarks of commercial agriculture. Farmers in Connecticut and New York concentrated on fruit production; Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan were renowned for dairy; the midwestern farmer favored corn and soybeans; wheat and alfalfa grew on the Great Plains; and cotton and tobacco remained staples in the South. The tendency towards rationalization reached its apogee in California, where Central Valley farmers developed a lucrative fruit-and-vegetable enterprise based on commodity exchanges and supply controls. Large-scale industrialized producers came to dominate the market in the Far West based on capital investment, vertical integration, and cheap migrant workers lacking union representation.

The period of agricultural prosperity that marked the early 1900s came to an end in the 1920s. Crop prices decreased as war demand and relief programs faltered. Many small farmers had overextended themselves to meet wartime exigencies. Mechanization, increased acreage under cultivation, a declining birthrate, and protectionism created a surfeit of agricultural products. Prices plummeted, with gross income from agriculture declining from nearly$17 billion in 1919 to less than $12 billion ten years later. The situation became more acute after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which caused a massive fall in the domestic produce market as a consequence of mass unemployment. In 1932, grain prices ran at twelve cents per bushel; hogs rated at three cents a pound. In 1933, the index of farm prices stood at 70, from a figure of 148 four years earlier.

Farmers in the Midwest faced environmental as well as economic catastrophe. A dry spell beginning in 1931 brought parched crops, cracked earth, and dust storms. Many farmers abandoned their plots, leaving more loose topsoil to be whipped up by strong winds. Historians continue to debate the cause of the Dust Bowl, positing drought, inappropriate agricultural practices, and an exaggerated belief in human ingenuity as contributory factors.

On 14 April 1935, a day known as Black Sunday, dust storms darkened the sky from the eastern seaboard to the Rockies, an area of some 100 million acres. In the worst-affected regions—Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico—the "Dirty Thirties" caused crop failures, livestock die-offs, and a bout of respiratory ailments. One eyewitness recalled how "all we could do about it was just sit in our dusty chairs, gaze at each other through the fog that filled the room and watch that fog settle slowly and silently, covering everything—including ourselves—in a thick, brownish gray blanket." Around 500,000 people chose to leave the Midwest during the 1930s, a migration epitomized by the flight of the Okies to California.

The New Deal

Having pledged a "New Deal for the American People" at the Democratic National Convention in July 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933, determined to tackle the social and economic malaise wrought by the Great Depression. Judging it imperative to keep the country farming, New Deal reforms were quick to focus on agriculture. Agrarian communities received crop subsidies, credit relief, and soil conservation programs to the tune of $1 billion. Such measures continued a historic involvement of the federal government in promoting agriculture. However, FDR's activist program inaugurated a new level of intervention. Where the Hoover administration had previously advocated voluntary crop supply restrictions and limited help for cooperatives, Roosevelt committed the government to agricultural planning, production, distribution, and financial subsidy on an unprecedented scale.

The centerpiece of legislation for the American farmer was the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of May 1933. The AAA sought to stabilize crop prices and farmers' incomes by controlling the production of seven basic commodities. The federal government was authorized to negotiate with producers to reduce acres under cultivation, while a tax on processors further discouraged production. Farmers received compensatory checks for leaving land fallow, a handout that the government hoped would prevent loan foreclosures. Between 1934 and 1935, the AAA successfully reduced the amount of land given over to tobacco and cotton, but it failed to have a discernible impact on staples such as wheat, hogs, corn, and dairy. Critics pointed out that the AAA favored large and efficient producers (with more land to put aside) over tenants and sharecroppers. In 1936, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the tax on processors unconstitutional, resulting two years later in a revised act that compensated producers who instituted soil conservation measures.

The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) of October 1933 allowed the government to purchase crops and distribute them in such a way as to prevent price rises. Commodities that could be stored were withheld from sale, while perishable goods were given to charitable organizations and schools or were exported. The CCC paid more than the market value, providing an important safety valve for farmers in need of support. Other measures designed to shore up the agricultural sector by providing financial aid included the Farm Credit Act of 1933, the Resettlement Administration of 1935, and the Farm Security Administration (1937).

New Dealers prized rural electrification as a way of modernizing American agriculture. As of 1930, only 571,000 of the 6.3 million farms in the country featured electrical lighting. Regional disparities existed. California, Utah, and Washington were well catered for, not least because of the preponderance of irrigation programs requiring considerable power to run. In Arkansas and Louisiana, by contrast, only one in one hundred farms had electricity. A public scheme providing loans for power lines and generating stations was established under the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933. Created by executive order the same year, the Electric Home and Farm Authority (EHFA) forwarded low-cost loans to farmers for electrical equipment. Inspired by the success of the TVA in bringing power to agrarian communities in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, Roosevelt inaugurated a country wide Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in May 1935. Improvements in production techniques, mechanization, rural education, and domestic life marked the REA as an outstanding success.

The REA's motto, "if you put a light on every farm, you put a light in every heart," nonetheless failed to stem the flow of families leaving the land for the city. In New England, the number of farms dropped from 103,255 in 1930 to 21,670 in 1950. The three million African American tenants and sharecroppers who worked in the South faced poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination. The New Deal brought benefits in the form of loans, price support, and soil restoration, yet it proved of limited effectiveness in improving the overall lot of the farmer. It was only with World War II and increased demand for foodstuffs, increases in industrial employment, and buoyant prices that the agricultural sector fully recovered. That said, FDR's New Deal remained immensely important for American agriculture, as programs enacted in the 1930s set a pattern of government regulation that persisted for the rest of the twentieth century.

Agriculture Since 1945

The post-1945 period saw American agriculture become more industrialized and capital intensive. Acreage under cultivation increased with advances in technology, irrigation, and genetic engineering. The number of individual farm units declined markedly. At the time of the Civil War, 60 percent of the American population was involved in agriculture. By 1972, this figure stood at 4.6 percent. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, less than 2 percent of Americans were engaged in farming.

The commercialization of agriculture ensured that the small family farm lost out to large, efficient, and mechanized producers able to benefit from economies of scale. In 1955 John H. Davis, former assistant secretary of agriculture, coined the phrase "agribusiness" to describe the new breed of corporations that controlled the entire agricultural process from production to marketing, making deals with individual producers to deliver crops at fixed prices. The modernization of American agriculture brought significant regional changes. As consolidated agribusiness took hold of the modern plantation in the South, cattle, hogs, peanuts, and soybeans became as important as cotton. Meanwhile, the tenure system that had dominated southern agriculture since the late 1800s was replaced by owner or part-owned farms. By 1974, only 12 percent of farms in South Carolina were operated by tenants.

A single American farmer produced enough food to sustain ninety-seven other people by the 1990s (compared to five in 1800), a level of extremely high productivity facilitated by technology. Irrigated farming dominated the Great Plains after technicians in the 1950s developed machinery capable of siphoning water from the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground supply buried from fifty to three hundred feet below the prairie. From the 1940s onwards, chemicals, pesticides, and herbicides (many of which, including DDT, were developed for use in World War II and converted for peacetime use) further raised output. Crop duster planes scattered chemical supplements over the land in order to combat pests and aid seed growth. The use of such additives greatly increased production, although critics, notably the biologist Rachel Carson in her 1962 best-seller, Silent Spring, warned of dangerous ecological side effects. Citizen lobbying and scientific research led to a domestic ban on DDT in 1969. Since the late twentieth century, the agricultural sector has looked to biotechnology and genetic modification as ways to maximize crop resilience, productivity, and consumer appeal.

American agriculture continued to rely on government assistance. Federal programs centered on keeping farmers on the land by taking acreage out of cultivation and offering price supports, as with the Soil Bank Program of 1956 and the Food and Agriculture Act of 1965. Federal policy also encouraged production under subsidy for export to the developing world. With urban dwellers demanding high-quality, low-cost food, the rural sector faced considerable pressures in the post-1945 period. Boycotts and tractor convoys were among the tools employed by the National Farmers Organization, organized in 1955, and the National Farm Workers Association, founded in 1962, to lobby for improvements in rural standards of living. In the twenty-first century, prosperity for the farmer remains dependent on land, weather, market prices, capital investment, and government aid. As of 2000, federal spending on the agricultural sector ran at $71.1 billion, perhaps a testament to the special place of the farmer in American life.

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986.

Cochrane, Willard W. The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis. 2d ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Cowdrey, Albert E. This Land, This South: An Environmental History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Fite, Gilbert C. Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.

Hart, John Fraser. The Land That Feeds Us. New York: Norton, 1991.

Hurt, R. Douglas. American Agriculture: A Brief History. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994. A good introductory work that offers suggested readings at the end of each chapter.

Knobloch, Frieda. The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

MacDonnell, Lawrence J. From Reclamation to Sustainability: Water, Agriculture, and the Environment in the American West. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1999. A study of irrigation in western agriculture through four case studies.

Meinig, Donald, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. 3 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986–1998. Includes Atlantic, continental, and transcontinental America.

Opie, John. The Law of the Land: Two Hundred Years of American Farmland Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. A critical review highlighting the problematic assumptions behind American agriculture.

Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and the New Deal. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982.

Starrs, Paul. Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Worster, Donald. The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. A seminal account of the "Dirty Thirties" by one of the West's foremost environmental historians.

—John Wills

Agriculture is that sector of an economy concerned with the production of food and food products both for domestic use, in (industrial) production and (household) consumption, and for export to external markets. Although it is often difficult to define the sectoral boundaries of agriculture with precision, agriculture is critical to the process of economic growth and economic development. Less developed economies are typically primarily agricultural in terms of output and resource usage and, appropriately, focus on institutions and policies that encourage the modernization of agriculture as a sector to support the growth of industry and services.

As economic growth and development occur, the relative importance of the major producing sectors changes, usually with a declining relative importance for agriculture and a growing relative importance of industry and services. This means that, in the early stages of economic development, agriculture is an important sector in which productivity growth sustains the growth of output. This process involves the substitution of capital for labor and changes the role of agriculture itself as economic growth and development proceed.

In the Russian case, the agricultural sector has always been surrounded by controversy. The reasons for this controversy are best understood within the context of the individual periods of Russian and Soviet economic growth and development, although there are common threads throughout. Not only are policies and institutions important, but ideology has played a major if not always constructive role in this essential sector.

Prior to the legal end of serfdom in 1861, the Russian rural economy was organized on a communal basis (the mir). The premodern agriculture under this feudal-manorial system was characterized by limited mechanization, archaic modes of land usage, and the limited development of human capital.

With the formal end of serfdom in Russia and the emergence of significant economic growth after 1880, attention focused on the extent to which a modern agriculture (emerging market institutions, market policies, investment in both human and physical capital, and so forth) was emerging in Russia and could therefore serve as the under-pinning of industrialization. From an ideological perspective, this would mean the development of capitalism. Two major schools of thought, the agrarian crisis view and the revisionist view, address this issue in different ways. The agrarian crisis view argues that backwardness was sustained prior to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, while the revisionist view sees significantly greater change in the agricultural and other sectors. These interpretations have both been important for our understanding of the level of economic development in 1917, the ideological options available to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and the subsequent discussions regarding agriculture during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period.

The second important era in which agriculture became controversial in Russia is the NEP of the 1920s and its termination through mass collectivization. While the role of agriculture in Russian economic development was an issue of major importance in the 1920s, the implementation of collectivization by Josef Stalin in the late 1920s radically changed the institutional arrangements: It attempted to create a mechanism to support rapid industrialization, while at the same time imposing the ideology of collectivism. It has been argued that, from a strategic point of view, the policies and institutions established did not in fact finance Soviet industrialization. Worse, it has also been argued that the legacy of these institutions and related policies, and especially their manner of implementation, led to serious negative long-term consequences for the necessary but unachieved long-term growth of agricultural productivity. In these respects, collectivization has been viewed, in broad perspective, as a mistake.

The third important era for Russian agriculture is the post-collectivization experience through the end of the 1980s. In spite of continuing attention to and controversy surrounding agriculture in this era, it is agreed that agricultural productivity declined from the 1950s through the 1980s to such a degree that significant grain imports became necessary beginning in the 1960s. Thus agriculture became increasingly expensive (an effect of poor productivity performance) and was artificially sustained by large state subsidies. From a structural point of view, agriculture in this era failed in the sense that agricultural productivity change could not support necessary structural change, a legacy that would await the reformers of the transition era.

Finally, when the Soviet system collapsed and Russia faced economic transition to capitalism, agriculture as a sector was largely neglected. Whereas it was commonly predicted that agriculture would be a leading sector in transition economies, this was not the case in Russia. From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is evident that during transition agriculture has been a low-priority sector, one in which institutional change has been at best modest. Although markets have emerged and trade patterns have changed, the most fundamental element of market agriculture, namely the pursuit of private property rights along with appropriate institutional support, remains controversial and elusive.

Bibliography

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—ROBERT C. STUART

The cultivation and harvesting of food in the Middle East, and how it has responded to the pressures of local and global demand and available environmental resources.

Soil cultivation for the production of crops began in the ancient Near East around 10,000 B.C.E. (the Neolithic Revolution), and agriculture is the base of the past and current civilizations of the region. In 1996, 50 percent of the Middle East's population still lived in rural areas. Through the centuries, various rural cultures have developed, and they have balanced environmental and social factors. For example, they have introduced various collective water-management systems. Nevertheless, in terms of food, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has become the least self-sufficient of the world's major populated regions.

Increasing Demand

In 2000, values for the agricultural exports for the entire MENA region were about US$11 billion, whereas the value of agricultural imports totalled
about US$33 billion. Although the differences among Middle Eastern countries are great (for example, Turkey is an occasional exporter of wheat, but Sudan repeatedly experienced famine during the 1980s and early 1990s), some regional generalizations can be made. Rapidly increasing demand for food has outpaced the domestic supply, because of population increase and considerable expansion of per capita incomes during the period of the petroleum boom (roughly 1973 - 1985). Supply response has been significant, although it has been constrained by nature, history, and public policy, but the agricultural systems of the region have undergone considerable transformation as a result of recent efforts to increase domestic food supplies.

During the period from 1980 to 1990, population in the MENA grew at 3.1 percent each year (only sub-Saharan African populations are growing more swiftly) but then slowed in the period from 1990 to 1999 to 2.2 percent, reaching a population of 301 million in 2001. From 1965 to 1988, per capita income was also growing at about 3 percent each year, but in the decade from 1991 to 2001 economic growth was slower in MENA than in any region except sub-Saharan Africa and the transition economies of Europe and Central Asia. From 2000 to 2001, the growth of output per capita was less than 1 percent.

Middle Easterners spend a substantial fraction of their additional income on food, especially on luxury foods such as meat and fresh produce. Accordingly, the demand for all food rose at about 4 to 5 percent each year, and the demand for meat, milk, vegetables, and fruits rose at roughly 6 percent each year in the same period.

Few of the world's agricultural sectors could have met this increased demand from domestic supply alone. The countries of the MENA could not, and they became increasingly dependent on food imports. Most countries in the region now import at least 290 pounds (130 kg) of grain per person per year, and many import far more. In 2001, Libya imported 885 pounds (402 kg), Jordan imported 764 pounds (347 kg), and the United Arab Emi-rates imported 1,852 pounds (841 kg). These are similar to the amounts needed by the nonagricultural city-state of Singapore. Over the decades, this increasing food dependency has led many national planners in the region to try to accelerate agricultural growth, but they have had to deal with significant natural and social issues.

Water

The scarcity of fresh water is the main natural obstacle to greater food production in the region. With only 1.847 cubic yards (1,413 cubic meters) of fresh water available per capita in 2000, the MENA ranks well below the average of other regions. Drought, a recurrent phenomenon in the region, seriously affects agricultural production. Many of the desert areas receive less than 20 inches (50 cm) of rain per year, making non-irrigated agriculture extremely risky or impossible. Seasonal rainfall patterns are highly variable; only the shores of the Caspian and Black seas receive rainfall year round. Elsewhere, precipitation follows one of two seasonal patterns: (1) a winter maximum along the Mediterranean shore, in the Fertile Crescent, and in central and southern Iran, or (2) a summer monsoonal maximum in Southern Arabia and Sudan. Precipitation within these areas often varies considerably, and rain may fall at the wrong time during the planting cycle.

From the early 1960s, the total irrigated land area increased from about 30 million acres (12 million ha), some 15 percent of arable land, to about 42 million acres (17 million ha), or about 17 percent of arable land, in 1985. Irrigation resources are unequally distributed across countries. Roughly 34 percent of all irrigated land in the region is in Iran. In descending order, the four countries with the largest amount of irrigated land are Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq. Likewise, irrigated land as a percentage of arable land varies widely by country. At one extreme, virtually all (97%) of Egypt's farmland is irrigated, as is 65 percent of Israel's. By contrast, only 8 percent of Turkey's and 7 percent of Morocco's arable land is irrigated. Iran and Iraq irrigate roughly 33 to 40 percent of their arable land. Since irrigated land produces much more per acre than nonirrigated land, and produces crops of higher value, such as fruits and vegetables (as opposed to grains), these numbers understate the economic contribution of irrigated farming in the Middle East. In the MENA, the proportion of irrigated land has increased from 25.8 percent of crop-land in 1979 through 1981 to 35.5 percent in 1995 through 1997.

However, the development of irrigation has too often neglected long-term environmental issues, thereby jeopardizing the sustainability of the short-term gains from expanding irrigation. Two problems dominate: the neglect of drainage and the overexploitation of groundwater. Irrigation without drainage raises soil salinity, which reduces crop yields. Because irrigation raises output immediately, while neglect of drainage reduces it only after ten to twenty years, governments short of cash have often sacrificed the future by underinvesting in drainage. This problem has plagued most irrigation systems in the region as well as throughout the world. Overexploitation of groundwater is another example of heavily discounting the future. In many cases (Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula), this is fossil water, which is not renewable. In time, these ancient stores of water (similar to underground pools of petroleum) will be depleted and the farms and such ecosystems as oases that depend on such water will have to be abandoned.

It is often argued that since water is free to farmers they have no incentive to economize it. In fact, it is the giant irrigation projects, more than the farmers, that have overused this scarce resource. Two types of solutions were applied to this water problem: large-scale and small-scale infrastructure. Both are technical solutions and underestimate the social dimension of the problem. The large-scale solution is exemplified by such state projects as the Aswan High Dam (Egypt) and the Great Man-Made River (Libya). Drip irrigation is typical of the small-scale solution. Pioneered in Israel, it delivers precisely calibrated amounts of water to individual fruit trees or vegetables but costs at least three times as much to install as conventional flow irrigation. Drip techniques also require literature and trained technical personnel to operate them effectively. In addition,
water conservation imperatives have an impact on the choice of crops, and may reduce the allocation of land to water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, rice, sugarcane, and cotton.

The region's rain-fed farming systems generally employ Mediterranean dry-farming techniques, in which winter wheat or barley alternates with fallow and the grazing of sheep, goats, cattle, or camels. Also found in the region are systems that employ the dry-farming techniques of Sudan. The Sudanese-type systems run up against the problems of desertification and the relationship between semi-migratory cattle herders and sedentary farmers.

Cereal grains are the dominant crop in the Middle East, occupying more than 40 percent of the arable land. Wheat (indigenous to the northern Fertile Crescent) is planted on about 25 percent of the farmed area in any year and constitutes more than 50 percent of all regional cereal production. It stabilized at 55 percent in the period between 1961 and 2001 in Middle East but grew from 55 percent to 73 percent during the same period in North Africa. Barley, which is also indigenous, is especially well suited to drier areas and is a distant second. About one-third of all the land planted in wheat in less developed countries is found in the Middle East. Because of natural and social constraints, grain production has grown less rapidly than population in the region. Increasingly, greater output of grains and all other foodstuffs will require a shift from bringing additional land into cultivation to raising the output per unit of land. The only country with significant unexploited or underexploited areas of land is Sudan. Such intensive agricultural growth, however, is constrained not merely by water resources but by social conditions and economic policies.

Land Ownership

The principal social constraints to agricultural development have been unequal access to land and other problems concerning property rights; unfavorable terms of trade facing farmers (local but also international trade with Western countries); low levels of investment; and technical difficulties, such as those involved with irrigation.

Despite considerable differences between countries and regions, certain generalizations on land tenure may be made. Prior to land reform, land tenure was generally bimodal, with a small number of farmers owning large areas of land and a large number of others holding small parcels or working on the large ones as sharecroppers. In addition, states were and are active in shaping land-tenure patterns. Land reform has reduced but not eliminated unequal distributions of land. Governments have usually intervened in land-tenure patterns largely for political reasons, specifically to ruin their enemies. However, states often have had development strategies or programs that involved transferring resources from agriculture to industry and urban areas. Thus, states have tried to monopolize the distribution of farm inputs (fertilizer, equipment, and other resources necessary for agricultural production) and farm outputs (the actual agricultural products). Under injunctions from international organizations (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund), states throughout the region have retreated from land reform as part of a general regional economic trend giving an expanded scope to the private sector.

Governments often created state marketing monopolies as part of land reform programs, eventually allowing them to tax farmers by reducing the price of agricultural products below world market levels and raising the cost of inputs above world market levels. Such price policies, combined with macroeconomic and trade policies that distorted foreign exchange rates, weakened the incentives for farmers to produce the taxed crops. Not all crops were taxed, but grains and major export goods (e.g., cotton) usually were. These unfavorable pricing policies help explain the sluggish growth of grain output until the early 1980s. After that, governments increasingly recognized the need to offer farmers adequate incentives if the goal of food security was to be met. Taxes on farming have been reduced in many countries, and price policies have been improved. Less success has been achieved in improving life for small farmers (current policies bankrupt the family economy) and in improving macroeconomic policies that affect agriculture, such as inflation control and exchange-rate management.

Increased output per land unit is usually associated with greater use of higher yielding crop varieties (HYVs), which have been bred to be more responsive to fertilizer. The adoption rate for HYV wheat has been constrained by both limited water supplies and pricing policies. Only about 30 percent of Middle Eastern wheat fields are planted with HYVs, compared with nearly 80 percent in Latin America and Asia. By contrast, farm mechanization, especially tractor use, has spread rapidly, especially for such power-intensive tasks as land preparation. From 1979 through 1981, there were twelve tractors per thousand agricultural workers in the region, and from 1995 through 1997, 25 per thousand, which is higher than the world average. In 1960, there were some 2,470 acres (1,000 ha) for every tractor in Iran, but only some 247 acres (100 ha) per tractor in 1985. The use of harvesting machinery, such as combines, has spread more slowly than the use of tractors. The pattern of mechanization indicates that machi