Are Farmers Losing Their Right to Manage Their Farms Because of Contract Farming?

Excerpt: Farmers should be concerned about keeping the essential rights to the management of their farms in their own hands either as individuals or through cooperatives, or both. Farmers make up only about a third to a fourth of all the people who work to produce, process, and market farm products, including those who produce farm supplies. If large numbers of farmers should cease to assert major responsibilities for farm management and the risks of production, they might become submerged in the larger total of what has been called the "agribusiness sector." If the people who live out on the farms cease to make the vital decisions, they will become in effect piece workers, sharecroppers, or wage hands, and other entrepreneurs that have assumed the risks and responsibilities of management will eventually become the leaders of, and the spokesmen for, agriculture.