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Property Contract Farming, Contract Labor “FARMERS,” WRITES GEOGRAPHER JULIE GUTHMAN, “are essentially price-takers, especially when faced with crops about to perish.” Because of that (among numerous other factors), Guthman argues, innovation—taking the forms of intensification (speeding up production and reducing “the risks of biological production”), appropriation (hiving off some processes and subjecting them to factory-production processes: the rise of food processing or fertilizer industries, for example), and valorization (“finding new ways to enhance the desire for the product itself as opposed to intensifying the creation of value or extracting value from others”)—is a constant in that most traditional of economic activities: farming. Added to this, of course, is the constant struggle to lower the cost of labor and thus raise the rate of exploitation and therefore increase surplus-value production. As Guthman points out, however, any gains made through intensification, appropriation, and valorization tend to be temporary, as competition leads others to adopt the same innovations. Against all odds, agriculture is a highly dynamic field.1 Not that it feels that way to growers. For them it is a highly insecure field. They remain price-takers, most of them, because it is usually someone else (some other corporation) who controls, for example, the inputs to the field (fertilizer , pesticides, and seed stock) or the processing, branding, and marketing of crops (precious few growers can command the field all up and down the commodity chain like DiGiorgio). Most growers find themselves in the tightening grip of the cost-price squeeze we’ve already discussed. On top of that, they sit right on top of a land-value squeeze too. Land is capitalized not only on the expectation of uninterrupted supplies of “cheap labor,” but also on the expectation of future revenues given both current productivity and expected innovation. Such expectations may run counter to the movement of prices. As Guthman puts it: Because land values incorporate future expectations, the potential to reap more profit from a piece of land exerts upward pressure on land values in the present . Yet when prospects are dim—when, for instance, commodity prices are low—land values do not necessarily fall in proportion. So, for instance, U.S. ag- 338 • property ricultural land values increased 75% in real terms . . . between 1947 and 1987, at the same time that commodity prices declined 60 percent. In this case, much of the difference was made up by increases in productivity, yet the nature of these improvements—increased dependence on purchased inputs—effectively shifted value to off-farm capital and thereby decreased farmers’ share of agricultural output relative to land values.2 Add in pressure on values from other potential land-uses—like the voracious appetite for land that California’s postwar suburban boom entailed—and it is clear that growers knew they were sitting on a gold mine and were being totally buffeted by forces over which they had little control. The result was a deepening of a rentier class of rural land owners, either as farmers got out of the direct farming business (choosing instead to lease their lands and to live off the rent) or as nonfarming interests (Teneco, the Los Angeles Times’s Otis family) moved into the rural land market. A further, crucial aspect of the political economy of California farming was thus deepened: contract farming. One aspect of the contract system was rooted in the rise of the grower-shippers and powerful canning corporations. Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, canners began contracting at the outset of the season for specific quantities of produce at prespecified prices. “Grower-processer contracts are not arm’s-length deals,” Richard Walker notes. “In the processing-tomato industry, for example, the processors could control the variety planted, the planting and delivery times, hauling, and other factors. They went so far, as the industry developed, to provide seeds and plants, to offer technical assistance, and to supervise farm practices.” Walker goes on to detail the sort of (intra) class struggles that resulted from these arrangements (a “jockeying for position between [farmers and canners] and their collective organizations”), which have been vital in shaping the agricultural landscape (e.g., “canner contracts helped spur peach, pear, and other farmers to organize into trade associations”).3 But a second aspect of the contract system is also vital. This is the fact that out of the dynamics of land economics and the rising importance of the canner-grower contract system arose something like a new kind of...

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