Agribusiness, n., corporate controlled blocs of land producing food stuffs or other agricultural products.
Eastern Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire, p.n., a region of land controlled from Constantinople usually marked from the division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western under Diocletian (292) or the death of Theodosius I (395) until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
The rise of agribusinesses in post-1000 created the situation in which Manzikert shattered the empire, not 50 years after the death of highly successful emperor Basil II, termed the Bulgar-slayer. Today, though industrialization and mechanization of society has dramatically changed the equation, the fate of the Byzantine Empire still holds lessons for the eventual result of American agricultural development.
Agribusinesses are a practical concept that has existed whenever the rich have enough power and stability to wrest the means of agricultural production from the citizen-farmers, who usually lived at the subsistence or slightly supra-subsistence level. Prior to the industrialization of society in the 1830s and later mechanization in the 1930s, societies lived off of and prospered primarily because of their agriculture, and during the early parts of these later period the trade of agriculture was a prime creator of wealth. Manufacturing was too low volume to affect much beyond the lives of the rich for most of human history. Peak production occurred in rigidly organized guilds, where master craftsmen could turn out a customized piece of work relatively rapidly. No machines, other than those powered by man; no assembly lines; no serious production.
Farms create wealth, national stability, and military might. Most nations or pre-nation state authority conscripted or recruited primarily from sons, especially younger sons, leaving their farms for the cause of their nation or liege lord. The stereotypical farmer runs what is termed a small family farm, usually consisting of the farmer and his family, which is large by modern terms. Often, this stereotypical farmer employs a few hired hands to help and more during harvest season. However, these are not the only types of farms in history or in the modern world.
Today, the two main types of agribusinesses are the corporate and the large-scale family farm, what an earlier time would call aristocratic. The former includes companies like Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto, while the latter would be a family-run business, like Cargill.
Ninety-eight percent of U.S. farms are family farms. The remaining 2 percent are nonfamily farms, which produce 14 percent of total agricultural output (fig. 3). Two features of family farms stand out. First, small family farms make up 91 percent of all U.S. farms. Second, large-scale family farms account for 59 percent of all production.
--USDA, "U.S. Farms: Numbers, Size, and Ownership"
To put this in perspective, the small family farm has a ratio of 0.3 when comparing the percentage of the national agricultural production produced by small family farms to the percentage of the total number of farms these small family farms make up. By comparison, large family farms have a ratio of 8.3 and non-family farms 8.1. Quite a difference there, no?
Changing gears a bit, let's jump to the past. The Byzantine Empire, like all political groupings until the modern era, collected taxes from its farmers and higher classes. Like even today, those with more power and money had the greater ability to prevent their money from being taxed by the government. Larison on Kelo and eminent domain:
I would like to add a few notes from an historical parallel that occurred to me as I was working through my seemingly interminable reading list for oral exams. What the Court has allowed appears to me to be the full endorsement of the interests of what the Byzantine emperors generically termed dynatoi, the powerful, who were all those officials and landlords with sufficient influence and power in their local area to compel farmers to sell their land or be forced into dependent relationships with them. In the tenth century, as this new aristocracy of wealth began to emerge, a series of emperors attempted unsuccessfully to rein in the depredations of the dynatoi, both for the sake of moral justice (as the emperors themselves said at the time) and for the more obvious reasons of preserving the sources of state revenues and curtailing the political independence of the aristocracy. Those familiar with Byzantine history will know already that the efforts to curtail the dynatoi largely failed in the end, exacerbating structural instabilities, weaknesses and internal conflicts in the Byzantine state that hastened its collapse to the Crusaders in 1204, after which time the empire was never really in a position to recover or fend off even more aggressive invaders. The predatory habits and depredations of our modern dynatoi may not be having quite the same effects, but they are an acid dissolving the economic, political and social foundations of our country nonetheless.
--Daniel Larison, eunomia, Unleashing the Dynatoi
Prior to the Arab/Islamic Expansion of the 600-700s, Egypt was the Empire's breadbasket. The term represents something very much like our own Great Plains states, where massive amounts of food are produced each year. With its loss, along with the loss of the Tunisia region where Carthage was located, the Empire was forced to rely on the poor soils of the Balkans and the moderately productive Anatolian highlands to feed its people and populate its armies.
The dynatoi gradually showed an expansionist tendency over free small farmers and soldiers (who belonged to the same group of cultivators) by buying their properties outright or piecemeal and transforming them into economic dependants. This tendency over time became an extremely sinister threat to even the existence of the free peasantry. The dispute between the latter and the large landowners was inevitable. The Macedonian emperors were forced to take strict legislative steps against the dynatoi and in favour of the adynatoi, who were the tax-payers and soldiers, namely the pillars of the Empire. In this way, the dispute was virtually transformed into a struggle for the central power among the central power and the dynatoi.
--A Primer on Middle Byzantine History
The end result of these forces was the near total fall of the farmer-soldier citizen. Instead of answering to the imperial authority, calling up (and paying) soldiers based on region, called the Themata system, the imperial themes became dominated by a few landowners in each region. These landowners held sizable debt from the old farmer-soldier citizens, resembling the sharecropper situation in the post-Reconstruction South. These citizens now answered to the landowners, who became great magnates, controlling large swathes of land and collecting taxes on 'behalf' of the central imperial authority. Some portion of those taxes were 'lost' in transit, and so the nobles enriched themselves to the detriment of the Emperor, as well as the state.
After several revolts against the Imperial Purple, some of which were successful, the thematic armies were broken up into smaller units over smaller portions of land, called tagmata, to try to minimize the risk of a large force, answering to a great noble, rising up against the Emperor. This shift away from the themes primarily occurred in the century prior to the Manzikert disaster in 1054, when after suffering defeat at the hands of the Seljuk Turks, political instability convulsed the empire and the western half was lost to migrating Turks, practically up to the Bosphoros itself.
Clearly, some parallels appear. Today, we see a concentration of productivity under large-scale farms and corporate farms. The Jeffersonian citizen-farmer and agrarian society are both certainly things of the past. The agriculture lobby is a thing to be feared on Capitol Hill if you oppose it, and your wallet appreciates it greatly if you can be of use to it. Populists have rarely been able to do much for the small farmer, with the New Deal being a notable exception.
However, here's where the historical analogy begins to break down. During the period of 1830 to 1930, massive industrialization and mechanization of society took place. Looking back at those pie charts posted at the start of the post, it is clear that non-small farms are massively more productive than the small farms, yet the small farms still make up a majority of the number of farms today. A key aside is that I haven't found any information about the percentage of total acreage in each type of farm, which could be useful in arguing about the progress of land accumulation up to this point.
That aside, industrialization and mechanization both rely on access to capital. The small farmer, usually already flirting with debt, is pretty unlikely to invest in much in the way of machinery. With small amounts of land, the improvement in productivity is marginal at best. This is likely one of the leading reasons that the productivity ratio is so off. Only those with large amounts of land are likely to have the capital necessary to heavily mechanize. Unfortunately, it's a catch-22, since modern agricultural machinery makes it possible to farm increasingly large plots of land per full-time equivalent (FTE). This means that small farmers are a dying breed in today's mechanized world. The large will seek to grow larger and inevitably have the resources to do so.
However, industrialization/mechanization may have broken the historical record. Previously in history, when large-scale accumulation of farmland has occurred, society tends to fall apart. Massive inequality gaps appear and society tears itself to pieces with no middle to serve as a balance point. This was the fate of the Byzantine Empire, which almost disappeared after Manzikert, if not for Alexios Komenos, truly a Great Man of history, though I'm not sure if I buy into that theory generally. The eventual fall occurred in the 100 years prior to 1453, as the Ottomans grew and grew in power and the nobles dithered their time away, as the storm clouds gathered on the horizon.
What will be our fate, having lost the citizen-farmer, yet gaining the urban and suburban citizen instead?
Post Script -- Okay, this one was fun, but next I'll be returning to the Path to War series and look at the rise of paramilitary groups in the decade prior to the Civil War. Then, it's off on a tangent again, discussing the possibility of nationalizing lobbying/massively expanding something like the Congressional Research Service. Stick around...