Why does USA still have a strong agricultural today?

29 comments

1. Someone needs to grow food for the rest of the world to eat.

2. Lots of land

3. According to wiki, agriculture is under 1% of the IS economy. Industry is around 19%. So right off the bat I challenge your assertion.

4. Lots of land and government subsidies.

5. Food is kind of essential. Timber and cotton and such have many uses as well.

6. 1.) I feel like this is a false premise. I would imagine Europe has a similar percentage of their labor force in agriculture. If not, it’s because the US has a lot more sparsely populated, fertile land.
   2.) Why can you see Canada having strong agriculture and not the US?

7. Europe has a lot of agriculture as well. Where do you think all the wine from Italy, Spain, and France comes from? Ukraine grows a lot of wheat.

   The agricultural areas may be further away from urban areas since the urban areas are so developed, whereas in many urban areas in the US there is still some farmland not too far away. But its still there.

8. First of all, that’s an incorrect premise about Western Europe.

   Second, we all gotta eat. We have the space and the climate(s) to grow things really well.

9. – Lots of land

   – much of that land is fertile and ripe for agriculture

   – US has multiple different climates which allows for growing an array of food instead of one or two crops (example- oranges in Florida, apples in the north, grapes and avocados in Cali)

10. I’m trying to figure out why it makes sense to you for Canada to grow crops and not the US.

11. I think this is one of the places where people underestimate how much land there is in the United States

    Size of Germany-357,002 sqkm

    Area of land dedicated to corn production in the United States-358,591 sqkm

12. US has lots of cheap and very fertile land.

13. Agriculture is part of the US Defense. It is considered an important part of sovereignty which is why it is subsidized so much. Combine that with a large amount of land located in areas which do not require additional watering to grow certain crops.

14. You say all this like agriculture isn’t also heavily industrialized.

15. >western European countries have gone full industrial since the nineteenth century.

    France, Germany, and the Netherlands are 2-5 in top exporter of agricultural products, behind only the USA.

    Europe has a large and strong agricultural basis, the US exports a lot of products due to the abundant arable land and the strong market for these products.

    Our agricultural industry is growing at about 2% a year while the EU’s grows at 0.5% per year.

16. there are multiple European countries with agricultural sectors, as a percent of GDP, larger than that of the US. I am not sure your perceptions here are accurate.

17. Where do you think your food comes from!? And there’s still plenty of agriculture in Europe.

18. The USA is a big place with lots of mouths to feed. And boy do we love our corn based products. Even a lot of our “sugar” is corn. We need more CORN. I am the great cornholio, and I have spoken.

19. Dear Americans,

    Why do you like to…

    *Spins wheel*

    Produce the items necessary for survival!!

    We do not do this in MyCountry.

20. We like food.

21. People need to eat, and every country should be able to be self sufficient in food production.

22. France, Germany, Spain and the UK still grow a shitload of food my friend. We have less people doing agricultural work because of industrialization. Big equipment is more efficient than lots of hands.

23. By and large California alone feeds some 90% of the US. You don’t necessarily need a lot of land to grow food.

24. Why shouldn’t we produce food if we have the space and the means to do so?

    Also, why is it understandable for Canada?

    One more question, do you know literally *anything* about agriculture?

25. I saw tons of agriculture while I was taking the train through Belgium and France earlier this year. This premise is just not true.

    Agriculture will always be important because food is important. And agriculture is highly industrial in this day and age.

26. … because people like to eat?

    Is this a serious question?

27. Largest contiguous tract of farmland on the planet. Good growing season.

    Plenty of metro areas aside from the farmland.

    More than enough room for both industrial agriculture and sprawling metropolis, with a lot of recreational nature preserve on the side.

28. America has a very strong agricultural sector in terms of production, so much so that between the mid-1800s and 1970s we regularly had crises of overproduction resulting in low prices and farm foreclosures for many small farmers. Numerous social movements, from the Free Silver movement (monetary reform), to movements for rail rates to be federally regulated (to make midwestern grain cheaper to the world market) or for the Mississippi to be dredged (to create a towboat route to compete with the rails), to populist movements and tenant farmer unions, all occurred around the economic problems caused by over-production for the small farmer class. America had such a large class of small farmers in part because westward expansion and settlement relied on giving farmland to willing settlers, and the ideal of the small farmer was very tied in with ideals of Jeffersonian democracy and small-r republicanism.

    After the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the New Deal put in place a number of federal programs to encourage farmers to let land lie fallow to regenerate, and to buy up excess grain in highly productive years to store it and let it onto the market in times when harvests weren’t great. The US also developed an extensive foreign aid program with our food in order to off-load excess production, which on the one hand feeds people around the world but on the other hand often stimies the growth of profitable farms in the developing countries we send food to. This is tied in with a concept called “price dumping”.

    In the 1980s, there was a farm crisis following changes in policies by Reagan’s secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, who switched from trying to incentivize farmers to keep production under control and prices stable, to directly subsidizing commodity crops like corn and soybeans. His slogan was “Get Big or Get Out”. Farmers profited greatly at first because a short harvest in the USSR left the world market hungry for grain, but then they took out a lot of loans for equipment and other inputs and the prices plummeted due to overproduction here and a bumper crop in the USSR, leading to a massive wave of farm foreclosures across the US. Many small farmers lost their farms as the larger farms bought them up or they were gobbled up by real estate developers, while others clung on but make most of their income from off-the-farm jobs. Many farm kids of that generation moved to the city for a better chance of a real career.

    A new generation of idealistic and sometimes foolhardy organic/alternative farmers have tried to make a go at it as small farmers. Sometimes they find a niche that works and they manage to make a decent living. Often they find they still have to work an off-the-farm-job.

    Today, the US still has a lot of small farms, but the farmers often make most of their income from other jobs. Larger and medium-sized farms, and the phenomena of small farmers renting their land out to larger growers or growing on contract, is increasingly the norm. Our agricultural system is highly mechanized and tends to use a lot of fertilizer and pesticide, to the point that this creates water quality problems in many highly agricultural watersheds and a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The most labor-intensive part of our agriculture is growing vegetables and fruit, and this tends to rely on a large immigrant workforce, mostly Latino, in places like the orchards and “salad bowl” of California or the tomato industry in Florida.

    America also tends to be very wasteful with the food we do grow, throwing out some third of our food for various reasons, often cosmetic or because we bought it but then let it expire. The American diet is much higher in processed foods and in meat than most diets. This eats up a lot of surplus corn and soybean supplies- actually, most of the corn and soybean we grow ends up as animal feed. The amount of processed foods, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, and animal fats that Americans eat contributes to a nationwide trend towards obesity.

29. >I can understand Canada but why the USA?

    This is a dig at somebody, but I can’t tell whether you’re trying to insult us or the Canadians.

    It’s also completely nonsensical, but hey.