SOYBEANS AS AN INDICATOR OF THE PROGRESS OF SOUTHERN AGRICULTURE SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Creators: name: Parry, Bruce E.
Publisher: name: American University
Year: 2023

description: The purpose of the dissertation is to examine the development of southern agriculture since the Second World War. This was done in light of Marx's conception of the concentration and centralization of capital. There are five specific hypotheses. Southern agriculture was and is involved primarily in the production of commodities, and during the period from 1945 to 1974, underwent a concentration and centralization of capital. This means that there became fewer, larger capitals in the southern agricultural sector. Soybeans, a crop highly adaptable to modern agricultural technology, were an indicator of the motion toward concentration and centralization. Finally, the development of southern agriculture proceeded more rapidly in the South than in the remainder of the United States. The importance of the topic lies in the fact that as capital concentrates and develops, it creates its opposite: a working class. This process, which has been rapidly occurring in the South as a whole since World War II, has not been analyzed with respect to the agricultural sector. The majority of the literature on southern agriculture that examines concentration of production at all, does so in terms of the continued dominance of the family farm or in terms of concentration by volume of sales. The dissertation examines the development of southern agriculture in terms of the concentration of production in the hands of a small number of large farms, at the expense of small farms. The primary method of analysis was the disaggregation by size class of data on physical, human and output characteristics of farms. Data for the South, the rest of the United States, and selected soybean producing counties, was compared. Due to the nonavailability of detailed data disaggregated by size class, indirect methods of analysis were employed. The year 1964 was selected for the analysis of farms by size class. Other data by size class was selected to show the trends of concentration and centralization between 1945 and 1969. Finally, general, aggregate data was used for the detailed time-series analysis of 1945 to 1974. Analysis showed that although land ownership was less concentrated in the hands of the largest farmers in the South than in the remainder of the United States, almost every other measure of capital was more concentrated. The measures include the value of land and buildings, equipment used on the farm, fertilizer, lime, etc. Both numbers of hired workers and expenditures on farm labor were far more concentrated in the South than in the remainder of the United States. They became more concentrated over the period of the study. Output data also showed a high degree of concentration in production. Soybean production served well as an indicator of the changes southern agriculture underwent in this period. Surprisingly, land ownership became less concentrated in the soybean producing counties over the period of the study. In this case, soy production was a poor indicator of southern trends. In almost every other area of study, however, soy production showed a greater tendency toward concentration than the South, while the South developed more rapidly than the remainder of the country. The major conclusion of the study is that capital concentrated and centralized in southern agriculture faster than in the remainder of the United States between 1945 and 1974. This is in accordance with the development of the capitalist mode of production, as outlined by Marx.