While the reputation and power of the US as a high-tech industrial and post-industrial power permeates imagery and actions at home and abroad, the US economy has long had firm foundations in agricultural production for domestic and foreign sales. Agricultural exports totaled more than $60 billion annually in the late 1990s, while the export of knowledge and technology also reinforces the global status of American agribusiness.

While agriculture is linked ideologically to the family farm and rural life or small-town values, since the Second World War, production has been dominated by corporations characterized by larger landholdings and supply networks, industrial and scientific management techniques, vertical integration, global ties and government support. In 1992, only 2.4 percent of American farms produced more than $500,000 in sales, but this accounted for 46 percent of all farm sales. Associated with these industrial farms and ranches are corporate suppliers, research institutions (commercial, government and state universities) and lobbyists.

Corporate agribusiness responsible to stock-holders has created tight controls within American production in which a handful of businesses can control beef production or Cargill, Continental and Archer Daniels Midland control three-quarters of grain exchanged globally. These companies, in turn, become powerful voices in policy-making in the US, through lobbying and party contributions. The links of production and distribution in large conglomerates also limit markets and possibilities for independent farmers and, in turn, for consumers. Chicken production, for example, has been reshaped through assembly-line controls dominated by mega-companies that render chickens immobile while they are stuffed with special foods, supplements and even pink contact lenses (that help unstressed growth). In this context, free-range or organic chickens emerge as elite alternatives of production and taste.

Such huge and concentrated farming creates conditions for environmental problems beyond their reliance on chemical fertilizers, insecticides and, controversially genetically engineered crops. More that two-thirds of all hogs, for example, come from farms of more than 1,000 heads. This concentration became disastrous as 1999 floods in North Carolina spilled their wastes into the state water system.

Agribusiness has been a source of debate concerning government subsidies and favoritism, environmental issues and, in the late 1990s, the long-term health effects of genetically engineered crops (which make producers dependent on companies each year for new seeds). Yet this industry also supplies the US and the world with abundance and choice at low prices that challenge simple questions of quality versus quantity or monopoly versus artesanal farm production. In both regards, agriculture and agribusiness, while constantly changing, promise to remain at the center of US economics, politics and lifestyles for generations to come.