White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

In making its terms with corporate business, farm entrepreneurship is in part becoming more like business management, and in part meeting its problems with the help and support of political power. All interests have come to look to government, but the independent farmer has, in some respects, succeeded more than others in turning the federal establishment into a public means for his private economic ends. The world of the farmer, especially its upper third, is now intricately related to the world of big government, forming with it a combination of private and public enterprise wherein private gains are insured and propped by public funds. The independent farmer has become politically dependent; he no longer belongs to a world of straightforward economic fact.

From on top, farming has recently been a good business proposition. Among the upper farm strata are included canners and packers and other processors and distributors, as well as those who look on the land as an investment only. For while the top-level farmers do buy more land during prosperity, business interests buy land and move into farm profits in other ways, during slumps as well as booms. Despite the great increase in productivity, the rapid increase in population, the vast expansion in demand for farm products, the free land available for home-steading-despite all this, the proportion of the rural real-estate owned by working farmers has declined for over half a century.