Owners and Operators of Farmland: Structural Changes in U.S. Agriculture

Abstract

Land tenure and transfer patterns in two Illinois farm communities are discussed as an example of the ongoing development, sociocultural influences, and intrasector variation within American commercial agriculture. In the aggregate, U.S. farmland tenure patterns appear to have undergone change over the last 40 years, with farmland ownership increasingly dispersed outside of the production sector. Today, the dominant pattern in commercial agriculture is for farmers to own some of the land they work and to rent some throughout their careers, a tenure type termed part-ownership in the conventional classification used in U.S. agricultural censuses. Ethnographic data from two Illinois farm communities illustrate the variation existing within this tenure category. Although most farmers in both communities are part-owners, those in one community are shown to have more control over the land they work than do those in the other. This difference is related to differences in inheritance practices between the two. ...