Impacts on Agricultural Sustainability from Structural Change in Peanut, Poultry, Swine and Tobacco Production Systems

Impacts on Agricultural Sustainability from Structural Change in Peanut, Poultry, Swine and Tobacco Production Systems

Summary

Objectives
Project collaborators used coordinated case studies to examine four major Southern farm commodities—poultry, hogs, tobacco, peanuts—for major structural trends, the impacts of these trends on sustainability, and reasons for both success and failure as farmers attempt sustainable agriculture and diversification.

Approach
For agriculture to approach sustainability, farmers must be financially secure, the environment must be stewarded, and rural communities must benefit from their agricultural surroundings. These requirements of sustainability better describe peanut and tobacco farming regions from the 1930s to the 1980s than they do to the same regions today. Poultry and swine production systems illustrate a transition to industrial agriculture. The shifting structure of agriculture leads to changes in behavior throughout the system. Many of these behaviors are unsustainable. If we are to achieve sustainability we will need to directly address the structures that shape behaviors.

The commodity structures analyzed in this project are on a continuum from systems of “traditional” independent farmers to industrial systems. Peanut and tobacco farmers have traditionally made independent production decisions within a relatively protected market. The federal programs for peanuts and tobacco have protected these growers from many of the forces of concentration and price diminishment that affect other commodity farmers, but these programs are both in deep trouble. At the industrial end of the agricultural continuum, poultry and hog growers make few independent production decisions within a vertically integrated system in which risk is mitigated by terms of their contracts. These contract growers hold on to their farms and maintain a modest farm income, but they forfeit their traditional roles as entrepreneurs who steward the landscape.

One Louisiana poultry grower, reflecting on this complicated dynamic, put it this way:
“I was talking with a friend and we sort of concluded that basically we have reverted to the old sharecrop system and that is basically all we are any more. I like to farm when I am treated like a partner who has as much invested as they [the integrator] do. We are content with what we’re getting but not content with the fact that we’re being treated like less than employees. I think what is going to happen is that the farmer will end up on the bottom of the totem pole.”

Reading through the data collected through case studies for each of these four commodities, one can’t help but be impressed by the magnitude of structural change and the challenges of that change to financial, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability.

Peanut and tobacco producers face what can only be described as a systems-level collapse, with a foretaste of disastrous impacts on family income, rural communities, and the landscape. Some of these farmers will diversify into entrepreneurial ventures and some will survive as farmers only with off-farm employment income. Some will engage in contract poultry or hog production, with results likely to follow directions indicated in this study. Much farmland will be converted through development or, in areas further from metropolitan regions, revert to brush and forest. Either way, the landscape loses its regionally unique qualities of stewardship and becomes a succession of subdivisions, strip development, factory farms and abandoned farmland.

These results are not inevitable. The south does not need to lose its family farm texture. Some regions of the U.S. and Europe demonstrate the potential for entrepreneurship, value-adding, agriculture-related business development, and landscape enhancement programs. The results of our analysis, however, lead us to conclude that current programmatic efforts along these lines are likely to be inadequate to the task of revitalizing an agricultural rural economy. Only a collaborative large-scale effort has any chance of making the impact our farmers, culture and landscape require. Furthermore, systemic solutions are not exclusively local or state, nor are they primarily technical or on-farm. Systemic solutions would require policy interventions in the underlying commodity structure of agriculture.

Collaborators: