A 2013 USDA report on US agriculture on average farm acreage dedicated to field crops had this to say;
The midpoint acreage for U.S. cropland nearly doubled between 1982 and 2007, from 589 acres to 1,105. Midpoint acreages increased in 45 of 50 States and more than doubled in 16. The largest increases occurred in a contiguous group of 12 Corn Belt and Northern Plains States. Midpoint acreages more than doubled in each of 5 major field crops (corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat) and increased in 35 of 39 fruit and vegetable crops, where the average increase was 107 percent.The USDA researchers measured midpoint cropland acreage instead of US median farm size as a better indicator of field crop farm land consolidation. The typical field crop operation has nearly doubled in size over the past three decades. The USDA researchers justly cite better financial returns as an explanation for the trend but this glosses over the deep social and economic structural changes in US farming and rural communities driven by agribusiness. The report explains that "average rates of return on equity increased with farm size" for five categories of farm commodities and further points out a contracting system is coming to dominate US agriculture replacing the old family farming system; as field cropping and livestock raising has increasingly separated, the contracting system has come to govern more and more farm crop production with big industrial contracts covering "...32 percent of crop production in 2011, compared with 23 percent in the mid-1990s.
US farming has become dominated by agribusiness as is clear not only by output concentration of various crop categories but by specialization and the rise of monocropping or the decrease in farm diversification. In 2011, more than half of all field crops came from farms producing two or fewer crops; over one fifth of crop production came from farms producing only one crop. Crop diversification was traditionally the pattern in US farming to prevent soil depletion and reduce risks such as pests. The gradual separation of livestock raising from field cropping (about three quarters of all US crops come from farms that raise no livestock) caused a deepening reliance of farmers on industrial inputs (fertilizers and pesticides) and finally, a greater and greater reliance on industrial contracts to assure sale of output. As the contracting system deepened, direct food producers played less of a role of independent family farmers and more of a highly leveraged link between providers of industrial inputs on the one hand and industrial agribusiness customers for their output on the other. This created a more or less "proletarianized" farmer in a vertically integrated food production process that is highly industrialized and which concentrates most of the profits from food production outside the farm itself.
Rural sociologist William Heffernan points to intense vertical integration as an indication that a given agricultural system is dominated by "monopoly capital" and has transformed food production into an integrated system dominated by a few industrial processors whose monopsonist power has reduced the farmer to a cog in the system. In a 1998 essay, Heffernan discusses the shift in relations between crop and livestock farmers and their industrial contract customers;
Vertical integration occurs when a firm increases ownership and control of a number of stages in a commodity system...this system gives the firm more economic power...feed grain is very important in livestock production. A firm like Cargill is one of the three major global traders of grain (the major ingredient in animal feed), the second largest animal feed producer and one of the largest processors of hogs and beef. Many livestock producers purchase their feed from the same firms to which they sell their animals...Another example...[is] ConAgra...ConAgra is the largest distributors of chemicals in North America, one of the largest fertilizer producers, and in 1990 it entered the seed business...ConAgra is the largest turkey producer and second largest broiler producer. It produces its own poultry feed as well as other livestock feed. It also owns and operates hatcheries. ConAgra hires growers to raise its birds and then it processes the birds in its own facilities...From the basic raw materials for agricultural production to the retail store, a significant portion of the food system is owned and controlled by ConAgra. ConAgra is the second largest food firm in the United States (behind Phillip Morris) and the fourth largest in the world with operations in thirty two countries.And Heffernan sums up his analysis regarding the transformation of the US food system under monopoly capitalism by describing the system of integration and corporate domination which led to the proletarianization of the formerly independent US farmer. He asserts; "In the subsistence food system, the family controlled its food from seed to plate. In the emerging, vertically integrated food system, a few food companies are gaining control of the country's food system by controlling it from seed to shelf. This system is being extended around the world by many of the firms that are headquartered in the United States."
Under this system, in which monopoly capital dominates US agriculture, the family farmer is returned to a system of debt peonage similar to that of tenant farmers in the early post-US Civil War era only this time dominant force is a concentrated monopoly of firms that control inputs and processing facilities whereby farmers are reduced to workers effectively paid on a piece rate system with no control over their income, contract terms or conditions of work. Thus, under late monopoly capitalism, farmers, even those with large operations, are reduced to low paid workers with most of the revenue from sales going to the big industrial processors. The gradual control of agribusiness of our food has led to high prices, poor food quality and the impoverishment of America's once vibrant rural communities.