Agricultural Ladder Research Articles

Migration, Bankers, and Social Capital. The Rise of a Basque “Industrial Cowboy” in the American West: John Etchart, 1900-1943

The present article contributes to the general topics of migration, banking and social capital. It analyzes the business career of John Etchart in the American West from 1900 to 1943; from being a wage-earning sheepherder to becoming one of the most prosperous stockmen in Montana. The biography-centered approach is patterned after the work of other scholars who have studied ranching businesses with emphasis on the dynamic individuals behind the companies. The biography of John Etchart offers a window into important issues for the study of Basque immigration and sheep industry in the West. Etchart’s story exemplifies the Basque immigrant’s climb up the agricultural ladder that involved the emergence of partnerships within the Basque community. Etchart is also tied to the creation and development of cooperative initiatives among woolgrowers beyond the Basque community. Finally, the Etchart history enhances understandings of the various business practices undertaken by livestock outfits in Montana in the 1920s and 1930s.

Are land-poor youth accessing rented land? Evidence from northern Ethiopia

Continued population growth in densely populated parts of Sub-Saharan Africa makes it harder for youth to choose agriculture as main source of income. We investigate whether near landless youth can access rented land as a source of income. We used data collected in 2016 (from 1138 youths in 119 youth business groups) and 2019 (from 2427 youths in 246 business groups), in five districts of Tigray region of Ethiopia. We find that 42% of the youth had access to rented land in 2016 and 47% in 2019. The average area rented land was 0.66 ha in 2016 and 0.74 ha in 2019. Access to rented land, though constrained, accounted close to 70% in 2016 and 61% in 2019 of the average operated land by youth group members. Male youth who own oxen and ploughs are much more likely to rent land whereas female youth group members appeared generally disadvantaged in their access to rented land and other complementary sources of income. Sharecropping dominated as the main from of land rental contract covering 94% of the contracts in 2016 and 90% of the contracts in 2019. Utilizing a trust game to elicit trust and trustworthiness of the youth, we found a positive association between trustworthiness and particularly accessing land from non-relatives. The prohibition of land sales limits the potential of the “agricultural ladder” to facilitate youth climbing out of poverty through purchase of land. Overall, the land rental market has become more important for land access of land-poor youth and is likely to grow in importance to facilitate rural transformation and diversification of rural livelihoods as land scarcity grows and market access improves. Thus, it appears that the land rental market has helped many of these very land-poor youth to establish sustainable land-based livelihoods. While the land rental market does not function perfectly, we recommend not to intervene to change the fundamental characteristics or to impose area restrictions in the market as has been attempted recently in Ethiopia. Such restrictions can easily cause more harm than good.

Growing Food, Growing a Movement: How Structural Racism Affects Immigrant Farmers

First paragraph: Most U.S. farmers and farm owners are white, while most farmworkers are Latinx immi­grants. This timely book uncoils the history, insti­tutions, and politics that racialize farming in America and the growing number of immigrant farmers—primarily small-scale and Mexican—who have climbed the agricultural ladder despite the crushing barriers they face. Author Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern deftly spells out the social, political, and cultural influences that built racism and anti-immi­grant practices directly into the structure of Ameri­can agriculture. She then enriches the picture with the stories of 70 interviewed immigrant farm­ers who operate within this structure; excerpts from her interviews are spotlighted throughout the book. Additional interviews with agricultural sup­port and outreach programs emphasize how immi­grant farmers are often excluded from start-up capital, land access, and farmers market access. The storytelling element, paired with Minkoff-Zern’s first-person perspectives and reactions, enliven each chapter and extricate the book from a purely scholarly work into an engaging read on immigra­tion, race, and agriculture. . . .

WOMEN IN FRONTIER ARKANSAS

AbstractArkansas was a demographic frontier after the U.S. Civil War. Despite marked agricultural land deforestation and development after the 1870s, it remained agrarian well into the twentieth century. We fuse life course and racial state frameworks to examine Black and White women’s settlement in Arkansas over the post-Civil War period (1880-1910). A racial state empowers residents and enacts policies based on race rather than equal citizenship rights. We highlight three institutional domains shaped by racial state policies:productive economies(subsistence, mixed commercialism, and plantation production);stratificationon an agricultural ladder (from sharecropping to forms of tenancy to farm ownership); andrules of raced (and gendered) social control. We examine women’s settlement patterns and related outcomes in an institutional context at different life course stages using mixed methods: women’s oral histories and Census data analysis. We find that by 1880 White women and families, less attracted by forces of marketization, had largely migrated to subsistence and mixed commercial subregions. Black women and families, generally desiring to rise on the agricultural ladder to farm ownership, largely migrated to the rich lands found in plantation production counties. Black women in Arkansas could rise but, by 1910, new racial state (Jim Crow) policies more severely limited travel, material resources, and education for tenant farm families, predominantly Black, in the plantation subregion. Commensurate with this, Black women in the plantation subregion had experienced less status mobility on the agricultural ladder, with reduced living standards, by later life.

Priests, Conflicts and Property Rights: the Impacts on Tenancy and Land Use in Brazil

Abstract Compared to the rest of the world, farmers in Brazil rely relatively little on tenant contracts. In agriculture, career mobility is associated with moving up the agricultural ladder from working for wages to renting to owning (Alston, L.J., and J.P. Ferrie. 2005. “Time on the Ladder: Career Mobility in Agriculture,” 1890-1938 The Journal of Economic History 65(04): 1058–1081. Cambridge University Press). Alone, this fact may not present a puzzle, but coupled with the large number of landless peasants and large amounts of unused land, the question is, Why don't landowners with unused or underutilized land negotiate land rental contracts with the landless.? In Brazil, this avenue for advancement has been hurt by a reluctance of owners to rent in areas experiencing land conflict. The lack of rentals is an important issue because Brazil is geographically a large country, roughly the size of the continental United States and has an expanding agricultural frontier, some of which is cutting into the Amazon. If the lack of land rentals is pervasive across Brazil and also signals inefficiency in production, the total magnitude is likely to be large when summed across the country.

Professional trajectories of youth in Saharan neo-agriculture (Biskra, Algeria) reexamined with the agricultural ladder theory

Dans cet article, nous proposons d’éclairer les dynamiques professionnelles des jeunes en agriculture sur un front pionnier saharien en Algérie en mobilisant une lecture en termes d’<i>agricultural ladder<i/> (trajectoire socioprofessionnelle permettant l’accumulation de savoir-faire et de divers types de capitaux) et de <i>cluster<i/> (concentration géographique d’entreprises du même secteur), dans le cas de la « plasticulture » (maraîchage sous serre). Notre analyse repose sur une enquête auprès de 100 exploitants dans la commune d’El Ghrous (<i>wilaya<i/> de Biskra). Ces dynamiques résultent de l’existence d’externalités positives du <i>cluster<i/> constitué autour de la plasticulture, et de la divisibilité des facteurs (eau, terre, serres, intrants et travail) dans ce type de production qui facilite l’installation des jeunes sans engager beaucoup de moyens. La progression sur l’<i>agricultural ladder<i/> est à mettre en rapport avec l’existence d’arrangements contractuels autour des ressources travail, terre et eau mobilisables par les acteurs.

In Pursuit of Conservative Reform: Social Darwinism, the Agricultural Ladder, and the Lessons of European Tenancy

In Pursuit of Conservative Reform: Social Darwinism, the Agricultural Ladder, and the Lessons of European Tenancy

Pathways out of rural poverty: a case study in socio-economic mobility in the rural Philippines

Exploiting unique household panel data covering a 30-year period, this paper attempts to analyse the patterns of poverty exits by examining socio-economic mobility in a Philippines village. Macroeconomic growth was a major factor explaining poverty-exit probabilities until the early 1980s. After the 1980s, poverty exit-paths through 'agricultural ladder' narrowed, schooling and growth became equally important factors owing to the increased returns to schooling, and labour endowments also became important for the lower, but not upper, social strata (providing an economic incentive to have more children for the poor). Surprisingly, we find no evidence of state dependence in poverty spells once observable factors are taken into account. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Time on the Ladder: Career Mobility in Agriculture, 1890–1938

We explore the dynamics of the agricultural ladder for black farmers in the U.S. South using individual-level data from a retrospective survey conducted in 1938 in Jefferson County, Arkansas. We develop and test hypotheses to explain the time spent as a tenant, sharecropper, and wage laborer. The most striking result of our analysis is the importance of individual characteristics in career mobility. In all periods—pre–World War I; the war years, and subsequent boom; the 1920s; and the Great Depression years—some farmers moved up the agricultural ladder quite rapidly while others remained stuck on a rung.Movement from rung to rung has been predominantly in the direction of descent rather than ascent. … [There is] an increasing tendency for the rungs of the ladder to become bars—forcing imprisonment in a fixed social status from which it is increasingly difficult to escape.National Resources CommitteeNational Resources Committee, “Report.”

Climbing the “Agricultural Ladder”: Social Mobility and Motivations for Migration in an Ecuadorian Colonist Community*

Abstract During the early decades of the 20th century in the American Midwest young farming families achieved social mobility by moving up an ‘agricultural ladder’ through a series of rungs, from unpaid family work, to wage labor, to tenant farming, to a mortgaged farm, and, finally, to full ownership of a farm. In this paper we use the concept of an agricultural ladder to understand processes of social mobility in a Third World setting. A case study of a small rural community in the Ecuadorian Amazon reveals that while the young think in terms of an agricultural ladder, they see temporary labor migration to distant places, rather than local wage labor, as the only way that they can amass the capital necessary to purchase land and reach the top rung on the ladder.

The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture

This ambitious and graceful work traces the interactions between Mexicans, whites, and blacks in central Texas from the turn of the century to the 1930s. As the number of Mexicans migrating to Texas sharply increased with the start of the 1910 revolution, cotton production in the region simultaneously shifted from small owners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers to larger enterprises dependent on wage labor. Neil Foley asks how these three groups dealt with this socioeconomic shift and in the process continually redefined their own racial identities.At the heart of Foley’s analysis is a sophisticated view of the connections between material forces such as landownership, the construction of racial and gender identities, and political ideologies and organizations. Foley is particularly insistent that racial and gender identities are tightly bound and mutually reinforcing. Whiteness implied certain notions of manliness and gender roles, and vice versa.The breakdown of the “agricultural ladder” (the assumption that farm laborers would eventually work their way up to farm ownership) and the increasing competition between whites, Mexicans, and blacks led to a complex swirl of social and political consequences. Women of all races continued to be constrained by agrarian patriarchy even as their workload increased dramatically. Foley interprets the slide of poor whites into the tenancy and farm labor previously dominated by Mexicans and blacks as a “loss of whiteness as well as of economic rank” (p. 88).Agrarian politics bore the marks of these gender and racial forces. In contrast to labor organizers in East Texas and Louisiana, the Socialist party in the teens in Texas proved itself unable to incorporate African Americans on any but the most unequal of terms. Poor whites desperately clung to their whiteness, Foley argues. White socialists were able to grant Mexicans a greater and more equal place in their party and its rural organizations, however, and their description of Mexican organizing “seemed to imply that Mexicans, if not African Americans, had become almost white through their manly opposition to exploitation” (p. 96).Despite the willingness of Mexicans to join their organizations, Texan Socialists proved unable to stem the rise in tenancy and farm labor. Large industrial farms, relying on mechanization, scientific management techniques, and predominantly Mexican workforces, soon accounted for much of Texas’s cotton production. More than any other development, the growth of these corporations “rendered obsolete the notion of rising up from farm laborer to farm owner” (p. 140). The Depression and New Deal agricultural policies further strengthened the hand of these corporations and other major landowners. The aspiration to the status of landowner, in Foley’s eyes, actually impeded organizing efforts in the 1930s. Unlike their counterparts in the rest of the South and in California, white Texans remained too attached to the now-outdated agricultural ladder to form effective, interracial farm laborers’ unions.Latin Americanists in particular will have reason to dissent from the book’s nearly pathological description of agrarianism. The agrarian suspicion of wage labor, and its assumption that a free society depended on widely dispersed landholding, had roots as deep in Mexico as in Texas and could be most appealing to the landless and dispossessed. Some readers may also find that Foley overemphasizes the importance of gender in white understandings of Mexican militancy and that he too quickly racializes elite white views of poor whites. But these questions are themselves the products of Foley’s tight integration of gender and race into a particular rural class structure. This innovative and rigorous work will be of interest to scholars of Mexican Americans, gender and race formations, the U.S. South, and agrarian studies for many years to come.

Land Ownership, Farm Size, and Tenancy after the Civil War

able to improve their relative status.' The competing story tells of a smoothly functioning agricultural ladder. Also constructed from the building blocks of census data, it is likewise consistent with rising tenancy rates and falling farm sizes. Microlevel studies beginning with the work of Merle Curti and Margaret and Allan Bogue and continued by Donald Winters, and Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman, among others, offer close-up views of midwestern land tenure. All indicate that the rising tenancy rate reflected a longer time spent on the lower rungs of the agricultural ladder with younger fanners building the wealth necessary to purchase their own land.2 If this more optimistic interpretation of the census data is correct, then data should show that some tenants eventually improved their relative status. New data show just such an improvement in the relative status of tenants. A case study of a Missouri township reinforces conclusions from these latter papers and other recent and detailed studies of local land markets.3 Even falrmers with little personal wealth and no real property were neither exploited nor left behind during the decades of economic growth in the North following the Civil War.4 The new data link the manuscripts of the decennial censuses of 1860, 1870, and 1880, for Salt River Township in Ralls County, Missouri, with

Tenancy as a Family Strategy in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ontario

The scholarly discussion of tenancy focuses, for the most part, on issues of tenure systems and their political context, agricultural efficiency, economic develop? ment, and class relations. While such issues are of utmost importance in under? standing tenancy, why and how individual farm families might use tenancy, for their own family-related goals, has been largely overlooked. I would like to look at tenancy, therefore, from the perspective of the historian. This analysis goes beyond the general explanations usually advanced by economists about why tenancy exists, such as the agricultural ladder, transaction costs, and risk sharing, and takes into account the economy. Here rather than assuming that one rents out a farm or becomes a tenant farmer based solely on shortterm, rational, profit-oriented reasons, such factors as responsibility to one's kin, balancing the needs of members and maintaining the farm over the generations will be considered. This paper, therefore, examines how farm families?both owners and tenants?used renting as a family strategy for sur? vival and economic advancement.1 In revealing how tenancy was used in the life course transitions of individuals and the collective needs of the unit at different stages in its life cycle, a deeper understanding ofthe role of tenancy is revealed. Several useful theories and models exist, within the framework of conven? tional economic theory which argue that tenancy emerges as individuals motivated by profit logically respond to the market forces of supply and demand. Scholars using these models argue that owners opt for renting out their land when the transaction costs of supervising, paying and getting labourers to honour their contract becomes too high, and tenancy becomes a more profitable arrangement.2 Either landlords profit from the rental income or, acting as speculators, they have their tenants improve the land and then sell it as the market in land escalates. Other economic models such as risk sharing and the agricultural ladder have been advanced that help shed light on tenancy from the tenant perspective. It is often argued that in agricultural systems where the risks of yields and prices are high, farmer owners and/or tenants will opt to share the risk through a tenancy arrangement.3 Related to risk sharing, the agricultural ladder posits that settlers, especially young farmers and immigrants, use tenancy as a rung on the agricultural ladder between labouring and ownership, and that rent? ing makes economic sense until such time as they acquire the requisite capitai and knowledge of land and farming techniques to make ownership a less risky and more viable enterprise.4 These economic models, however, do not fully explain the existence and util? ity of tenancy. Several anomalies exist that are not adequately explained within a

Agricultural Chutes and Ladders: New Estimates of Sharecroppers and “True Tenants” in the South, 1900–1920

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the increase in tenancy, particularly in the South, alarmed many social commentators and later was an issue taken up by a number of historians.' Indeed the issue of rising tenancy rates was a major plank in the platform of the Populist movement. However, before one can make interpretations of the welfare of agricultural workers as a result of this rise in tenancy one needs to look more closely at the individual rungs of the agricultural ladder.2 This article sets out to repair the damaged sharecropper rung on the southern agricultural ladder. Without additional information regarding this rung, it is impossible to get a complete picture of the movement up and down the southern agricultural ladder. In the census years 1900 and 1910, the Census Bureau incorrectly classified sharecroppers as tenants, placing too many workers on that more affluent rung of the ladder. The intent of this article is to estimate the number of sharecroppers in order to provide a more accurate count of the number of in these years. With this more complete depiction of the agricultural ladder, movements up and down the ladder between the years 1900 and 1960 can be more accurately discussed, and thereby a basis is provided for scholars to accurately address the true welfare implications of these movements. Much of the misunderstanding of how the postbellum southern agricultural system worked is based on misinterpretations of how the census defined a tenant, specifically how it defined a tenant. Beginning in 1920, the U.S. Census changed its tenant category to exclude sharecroppers. From then on share tenants and sharecroppers (or more commonly referred to as just croppers) were, in the eyes of the census, fundamentally different types of farm operators. Although a cropper farmed a certain plot and received a share of the harvest from that plot as income, he often differed from other tenants in important respects, especially when he worked on a plantation.3 There he was usually closely supervised; he made none of the major farming decisions; and he generally supplied no input besides labor services. In most southern states he had no legal possession

Longitudinal Analysis of Farm Size over the Farmer's Life Cycle

Correlation of farmer age with farm size, tenancy, entry, and exit is examined with farm-level data. Entering farmers are younger than exiting farmers. Young farmers and new entrants have smaller farms, grow faster, and are less likely to own farmland than older, more experienced farmers. Farmers tend to decrease farm size at advanced ages. The results suggest the continued existence of the agricultural ladder strategy for farm entry. Financial constraints could explain smaller farm size of young farmers and new entrants.

"Two-Step" Migration and Upward Mobility on the Frontier: The Safety Valve Effect in Pejibaye, Costa Rica

Previous articleNext article No Access"Two-Step" Migration and Upward Mobility on the Frontier: The Safety Valve Effect in Pejibaye, Costa RicaJames SewastynowiczJames Sewastynowicz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 34, Number 4Jul., 1986 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/451557 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1986 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Peter Richards What Drives Indirect Land Use Change? How Brazil's Agriculture Sector Influences Frontier Deforestation, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no.55 (Aug 2015): 1026–1040.https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2015.1060924Alexandre Magno Alves Diniz, Elisângela Gonçalves Lacerda The Colonization of Roraima State, Brazil: an Analysis of its Major Migration Flows (1970 to 2010), Espace populations sociétés , no.2014/2-32014/2-3 (Dec 2014).https://doi.org/10.4000/eps.5817Mohammad Abdul Munim Joarder, Syed Hasanuzzaman Migration decision from Bangladesh: permanent versus temporary, Asia Europe Journal 6, no.3-43-4 (Aug 2008): 531–545.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10308-008-0199-6Diane C. Bates, Thomas K. Rudel Climbing the “Agricultural Ladder”: Social Mobility and Motivations for Migration in an Ecuadorian Colonist Community*, Rural Sociology 69, no.11 (Oct 2009): 59–75.https://doi.org/10.1526/003601104322919900Anja Nygren Deforestation in Costa Rica: An Examination of Social and Historical Factors, Forest and Conservation History 39, no.11 (Jan 1995): 27–35.https://doi.org/10.2307/3983623Jeffrey R. Jones Environmental Issues and Policies in Costa Rica. Control of Deforestation, Policy Studies Journal 20, no.44 (Dec 1992): 679–694.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072.1992.tb00190.xNanda R. Shrestha Frontier Settlement and Landlessness among Hill Migrants in Nepal Tarai, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79, no.33 (Sep 1989): 370–389.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1989.tb00268.xNanda R. Shrestha A structural perspective on labour migration in underdeveloped countries, Progress in Human Geography 12, no.22 (Jun 1988): 179–207.https://doi.org/10.1177/030913258801200202

The agricultural ladder: Agrarian ideology and the changing structure of U.S. agriculture

‘Land to the tiller’ is woven intimately into the ideological and institutional fabric of the United States. Yet in the late nineteenth century tenancy and landlordism were endemic. Thereafter, the agricultural ladder metaphor was popularized to depict the mobility ‘rungs’ by which tenants could climb to full ownership. Tenancy persisted and even grew, however, until basic structural features of U.S. agriculture changed during and after the 1930s. Though empirical evidence that the ladder functioned as hypothesized is lacking, it appears to have served ideologically to prepare the nation for part-owner-operatorship — the ascendant tenure form in the new structure of agriculture. An analysis of the historical literature and agricultural census data from 1900 to 1978 is presented to support this interpretation.

An Analysis of Agricultural Ladder Research

An Analysis of Agricultural Ladder Research

Problems on the Farm Transfer Arrangements

Problems of transferring the farm to one heir are old but new ones. Even in U. S. where equal inheritance has been practised since the abolition of primogeniture and entail by Jefferson, keeping the farm in the family has become more and more urgent, with farm capital requirement at high level and with farms larger and fewer. Under these changing situation, the philosophy of distributing the property equally among several heirs has brought about many undersirable effects, some of which are serious. Frequently the death of the owner is followed by the disintegration of the farm. The farm is sold to settle the estate or land is divided into uneconomical units, or the heir who buy out the others must mortgage the farm. Especially for the operating heir whose contribution to the farm and parent has been great, it is unbearable to reorganize the disintegrated farm into a well balanced one and to go in a debt to buy the others that is beyond his earning power of the farm in times inflated land prices, like the present. So it becomes imperative to maintain the farm within the family without disturbing the essential unity of the farm as a going concern. However, the transfer of the farm as a going concern within the family conflicts with the equality of division prescribed by the law of descent and the security of the aged parent. Because as most of farmers use their farm as their “saving bank” and possess only limited outside savings, keeping the farm in the family tends to be a closed shop to the heirs except the farm successor and the transfer of the farm to the son at his early age frequently arises to give up the old parent's independence he earned and now he deserves. Thus to facilitate the intrafamily succession with minimum problems, better practices, not the change in the principle of the inheritance law, are being worked out and new practices such as gifts, annuities, purchase contracts and others are being taken. The purpose of this report is to analyze these inheritance problems and suggest the measures to meet them, mainly through the comparative study of the two researches in the eastern and southwestern part of Visconsin States made by Parsons, K. H., Waples, O. E. and Salter, L. A. Jr. in 1941. At the outset, through the analysis of the agricultural ladder in both districts, it is shown that in the eastern district many farmers climb the ladder elevatorlikely without stepping the tenancy and hired hand stage, and acquire the home farm early in their life, while in the southwestern partthe tenancy plays a significant role in climbing the ladder, and farmers generally acquire the home farm late in their life. It is also made clear that this defference in the agricultural ladder is asclibed to the difference in the succession practice. Then focussing upon this difference, in the latter district where the operatdrship of the farm is passed to the son after the retirement of the parent, but the title to the farm is not yet followed and as a result the division of farm property to heirs according to the law of descent after the death of the parent is generally practiced, an attempt is made to show that the operating son who remains on the home farm is never sure of his future ownership and, coming to a disasterous end, still remains the tenant after the death of the parent. Along with this, it is also made clear that estate settlement saddles the heir operator with a heavy debt that is beyond his long-term earning power of the farm.

A New Agricultural Ladder

A New Agricultural Ladder