Across the Great Divide: Agriculture and Industrial Geography

Research within industrial geography has illuminated the relationship between the restructuring of manufacturing and the reshaping of urban space. Industrial geographers have paid little attention, however, to the dramatic social and economic changes occurring throughout rural America. I contend that evident sectoral and urban biases mask an underlying issue: a persistent conceptual schism between agriculture and industry, in which agriculture is comparatively undertheorized as an arena of capitalist development. As a result, a significant part of the story of economic restructuring—the transformation of farming and the creation of new forms of rural development—remains largely unexamined. This paper sets out to bridge the gap separating industry from agriculture and thereby begins to recover this lost side of industrial restructuring. I argue that the incorporation of agriculture into industrial geography involves much more than a simple mapping of industrial theory onto farm terrain; it requires an exploration of the distinctive process of industrialization surrounding farm production. A careful treatment of agricultural development allows farming to be reclaimed from the conceptual backwater, while also providing an opportunity to scrutinize industrial theory from a forgotten perspective. Drawing on recent political economic research in geography and allied fields, I focus on three themes that emerge from the study of agriculture and discuss the lessons they impart to industrial geography: (1) the importance of sectoral difference to regional development, (2) the multiplicity of industrialization paths, and (3) the importance of locality. Each theme is illustrated using examples drawn from the Midwest.