The New Industrial Agriculture: The Regional Integration of Specialty Crop Production

Abstract

Studies within the theoretical framework of “the new industrial geography” have depended on manufacturing and service industries, overlooking the primary sector. When compared with manufacture, agriculture exhibits similarities and distinctions which reveal the particular historical role of natural processes and cycles in restricting the conditions of profitable production, systematically distinguishing agriculture from manufacturing and encouraging subsectoral differentiation around particular commodity complexes. This case study of specialty crop production shows that agriculture is also being restructured—vertically integrated by the concentration of control (within marketing and processing firms) over the production process at the same time as production activities within the farm and the sector are vertically disintegrated through a complex web of capacity and specialty subcontracting. Discovery of these integrated processes can lead to new understanding of the forces which produce agricultural regions.

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