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Corporate farming is often used synonymously with agribusiness. […] It is seen as the destroyer of the family farm. Two percent of all farms in the United States are owned by corporations or other non-family entities, but only half of those farms earn more than $50,000 per year.
Critics argue that the ultimate goal of corporate farming
is to vertically integrate the entire process of food production, from the development of proprietary strains of DNA through to the distribution and sale of food to consumers. Some corporations are considered to be well on the way to achieving this objective, and have become very large in the process, such as Archer Daniels Midland and the privately held Cargill, with 2004 revenues of $62.9 billion.
Corporate farming is a fairly broad term that deals with the general practices and effects of a small number of large, global corporations that dominate the food industry. It does not refer simply to any incorporated agribusiness enterprise, although most agricultural businesses today are in some way economically connected to the dominant food industry players."
(Free Dictionary,
Corporate farming, visited 2011-02-04)
