From a friend this morning:
“The question is how far down the road of alliances and seamless systems can a farmer go before he/she is no longer a farmer? In some geographic areas farmers effectively have access to only one market, and their closest agribusiness supplier, from whom they get most of their seed, chemicals and fertilizer, is in the same food system cluster. At what point do we conclude farmers are no longer making the major managerial decisions regarding the production of the crops or animals on their farms? These farmers use the genetic material, chemicals and fertilizers available from their supplier and they produce what their only market will buy. The managers of the markets make many of the decisions about how the product will be produced…We can now ask: how many of those 300,000 to 500,000 farms are operated by
farmers today?”