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

What is it about?

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 prevented seasonal laborers from settling in the town. Goldschmidt’s conclusion that Dinuba was better than Arvin might now be seen as a perspective of middle-class Dinubans that its workers may not have shared. En route to this new interpretation, I relate the failure of scholars to find this important data in Goldschmidt’s original work to the influence of the concept of the family farm.

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Why is it important?

This article reveals that Walter Goldschmidt's influential study of industrialized agriculture's impact on the quality of life in rural communities failed to support his thesis.