Change is inevitable. We often make bold predictions about what this change will look like based on firmly held beliefs in what ought to be, or what our analysis has led us to conclude. Farming is not exempt from these types of predictions. 

Over the years, much ink has been spilled debating how agriculture might change — the so-called “agrarian question.” It asks how and when capitalism could change farming by pulling it more tightly into the market and how these changes could affect the ability of rural people to act politically.

In simple terms, the agrarian question is an attempt to understand whether the independence of farmers will someday be replaced with only owners and labourers—like a traditional industrial factory—and if the art of farming will be replaced by capital and technology, despite farmers having resisted this for many centuries.

Analysis of agrarian changes that have happened over time can be summarized by what Henry Bernstein calls the four key questions of agrarian change: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? What do they do with it? 

Scholars like Bernstein believe there is too much contradiction to imagine a single class of farmers and that “slogans and good guys vs. bad guys” are not enough. Rather, farm activists need effective analysis of “the complex social realities they hope to transform with class dynamics at the centre.” To further complicate things, many analyses attempting to subdivide the farm population into groupings (or classes) are defined inconsistently.

For example, petty commodity producer (e.g. growing primarily for external markets at a small scale), subsistence farmer (e.g. growing to feed their household and sell small surpluses), and corporate farmer (e.g. a highly mechanized, and specialized large-scale operation growing for external markets) are commonly used categories. However, in some cases as many as seven different classes of farmer are defined, ranging from from landlord to landless labourer. 

There are, of course, category problems. For example, one might assume that an incorporated farm in Canada would be classified as a “corporate farm” but might instead be a termed a “petty commodity producer,” or theoretically could even be a subsistence farmer despite the legal title. Typically, what is really meant by “corporate” is shorthand for large-scale and industrial farming methods but, in places like Canada, this can be confused by a farm’s legal structures. 

Similarly, a large-scale commodity crop farmer running thousands of acres of land does use various modern corporate and industrial practices in order to cover vast landscapes. However, that same farmer is subject to the power of a very small handful of massive global agricultural input corporations who dictate the prices farmers pay, lock farmers into technology “packages” (e.g. chemicals that only work with specific patented seeds, GPS/data software tied to one brand of tractor and so on), and in some cases may be the same companies who purchase the crop at harvest. 

This corporate farmer is left at the whims of commodity crop price fluctuation and weather (and essentially the failure of other harvest seasons around the world), buying inputs at retail prices, and selling at wholesale rates out of their control. In many such cases these large farms operate at razor-thin margins, carrying high levels of debt and are indeed vulnerable despite being considered in the most privileged “class” of farmer. 

But, to what end do we subdivide farmers? The intended purpose of this sort of analysis is to better understand the “dynamics of change” over time and predict the trajectory ahead for farm life. With less than 0.5 percent of the Canadian population farming, might it instead be worth building allies and conducting analysis across the size and shape of farm operations to ensure a positive future for farmers?  

While differences exist across farms, few benefit from the existing social and political realities as evidenced by the collapsing number of farmers today. There are certainly important questions about how farmers will need to prioritize higher return on energy input per output and ensure their knowledge of place is respected in the future; but these challenges cross a wide diversity of farm types.

I don’t have an answer to what farming will look like 50 or even 10 years from now, but analysis that builds bridges to those who remain active in agrarian life is important. And while I do not think farmers being replaced by technology or capital in the future is a probable outcome, we should do everything we can not to increase its likelihood. ◊