Better for Whom? The Laborers Omitted in Goldschmidt's Industrial Agriculture Thesis

Abstract

Walter Goldschmidt's seminal research in the 1940s on the social consequences of industrial agriculture has fostered a continuing critique of large-scale commodity agriculture. Goldschmidt concluded that larger farm size produced a lower quality of life in rural towns by increasing the proportion of low-wage workers and moving capital and profits elsewhere. I address Goldschmidt's counts of seasonal laborers employed at the large-farm town of Arvin and the small-farm town of Dinuba, noting that Dinuba's seasonal laborers were more numerous than Arvin's and less likely to reside locally. Goldschmidt excluded this data from his analysis and conclusions, a fact that has eluded all subsequent scholars. I argue that Goldschmidt's community study method neglected class relationships that made Dinuba a predominantly middle-class community within a broader class-based geography. Using more recent studies from rural California, I suggest that the relative strength and coherence of Dinuba's middle class may have pr...