For thousands of years, agriculture has been an integral necessity for mankind as it has
provided us with food, fuel, and other natural resources that are integral to today’s society. The
idea of agriculture has sprouted from the simple idea of just planting and harvesting the crops on
the fields into a gigantic business with the introduction of new technology in the 20th century.
With the introduction of new technology that our previous ancestors would have never even
imagined possible, we have made food production way more efficient and sustainable for
mankind. There are various new methods to farm and harvest crops that even some of these
methods don’t require human labor for it to work. It is evident that the introduction of new
technology has greatly changed the agricultural industry for the better as this means there would
be more efficient harvests and provide more food and natural resources for people to consume.
The positive results of the modernization of agriculture are highlighted in the first article by
“From DE-TO Repeasantization: The Modernization of Agriculture Revisited.” which was
written by Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg, in which he describes the goal to re-examine the
modernization that was completed in European agriculture that took place after 1950. He
distinguishes the fact that modernization was far more than just an intellectual project but also
correlated with the political and economic transformation and shaped how future revolutions
would take place. He also introduces ideas of how new infrastructures that were previously
destroyed would soon be restored after the Second World War ended up leaving Europe with
millions of starving citizens. The second article that I picked also relates to the subject that is
being discussed mentioning the modernization of agriculture however instead of Europe it
depicts how it affects the United States. In the second article written by Diana Stuart, called
“Responding to Climate Change: Barriers to Reflexive Modernization in U.S. Agriculture” they
introduce the ideas Ulrich Beck’s theory of modernization in order to analyze how farmers
3
perceive climate change. Both articles introduce different ideas of modernization and they both
follow different formats of how they introduce the information to the reader.
My first article, “From DE-TO Repeasantization: The Modernization of Agriculture
Revisited.” written by Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg, introduces the ideas of the modernization
project that had a massive impact on Europe’s agriculture after the Second World War. The
modernization of agriculture did not just affect the agricultural state of Europe but also affected
the politico-economic state of Europe to align the new agricultural dynamics that were required
for this new system to work. This new agricultural modernization also came with new forms of
policies that expanded to transnational schemes and later became the basis of the world’s
agricultural policies. These new schemes included introducing new guidelines to speed up the
modernization of agriculture in not only Europe but in the world. However, this was not all
positive because as new guidelines were created alongside this modernization project there were
also new areas that were not as focused on and were actually ignored. The article then introduces
the idea that the Second World War had left Europe in shambles as there were starving
populations and the agricultural fracture was destroyed. The Second World War highlighted that
the current agricultural fracture of Europe was bound to fall in the long term. In order to consider
the idea that this would never happen again and millions of mouths would run hungry there was
a wide opinion shared among the Europeans that there should never be an agricultural fallout as
big as this one. In the article, it states, “Labour input increased considerably (as a matter of fact
during the 1945–1956 period the agricultural labor force steadily increased) and the principle of
‘mixed farms’ with access to a wide range of productive assets remained central to both policy
and practice.” New ideas were introduced to the agricultural industry in Europe and people were
focused on fixing the issues that the second World War had already caused. At the center of this
4
agricultural modernization project that was conducted in Europe was the idea that the
agricultural forces should be decreased in order to encourage efficiency and for these farms to
focus on a singular product. The article then connects this idea with a Chinese study which
states, “In short (as is not surprisingly said in a Chinese study on modernization that was
published for later): “labor is to move out of agriculture, capital is to move in” (Ye and LeGates,
2013: 230). It was assumed that this modernization process would increase rural incomes and
eliminate the struggle that seemed to be inherent to the farm labor process.” The writer
introduces other sources to connect with his main one in this case which is the idea of decreasing
the number of rural incomes and eliminating inefficiencies in farms. The author introduces all
these concepts using several sources to continue the research about modernization methods and
also provides numerous graphs that describe how these processes were carried out. The title that
the author uses describes how the rest of the article is going to happen precisely as it states he is
revisiting modernization and not looking at the current ideas. This article analyzes previous
agricultural modernization methods and compares them to other studies in order to find out how
effective these methods are for modernization.
My second article called “Responding to Climate Change: Barriers to Reflexive
Modernization in U.S. Agriculture” by Diana Stuart, provides us with the idea that the
introduction of modernization to farmers can also change their perception of how climate change
can affect their farms. As these farmers depend on their farms for their livelihood the idea of
climate change is very important to them as if the climate changes enough then there could even
be a chance that the very farmland that they work on could no longer be fertile for the plants. As
stated in the article, “Industrial capitalist agriculture is simultaneously deeply implicated in and
threatened by climate change” (p. 318). Agriculture remains an important contributor to GHG
5 emissions” This links the idea of climate change and its importance to the agricultural industry.
With the modernization of agriculture vastly improving the industry this also affects the emission
rates that are being produced into the atmosphere. In the article, it states, “0% of N2O emissions
in the United States (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2009). Most of these emissions are
linked to the use of nitrogen (N) fertilizer (Snyder, Bruulsema, Jensen, & Fixen, 2009). While
industrial agriculture has contributed to climate change, climate change will in turn affect
agriculture. “ This introduces the idea that the agricultural industry has mainly affected the
nitrogen emission rates due to their use of fertilizer in their farms. The article describes this as
the “boomerang effect” because the emissions are caused by the agricultural industry but in turn
they are also causing climate change which will affect their crops for the worse. Ulrich Beck’s
theory argues that can no longer ignore these negative outcomes that arrive because of the
modernization of agriculture because there are numerous negative outcomes that are also linked
to technology and the industrialization of the agricultural industry. Beck then highlights the
statistic that Germany has doubled their use of pesticides and fertilizers and the idea that people
are so focused on increasing productivity has blinded them from the fact that climate change is a
super huge factor to not only agriculture but also many other factors. The author uses personal
interviews, focus groups, and statistics to help the reader understand how the modernization of
agriculture can affect how farmers perceive climate change. This is his method of conducting
non-biased research and he is purely spitting the fact of the matter. The title of the article
introduces us to the idea that modernization can greatly affect the state of climate change around
the world. The author provides us with results from an experiment that is titled “Nitrogen
Fertilizer Application Rates Compared Between Commercial and Seed Corn Farmers.” which
connects with the discussion that is further down in the article. The discussion describes Beck’s
6 theories in more detail and the debate over whether or not Beck’s fear of modernization will
actually come to fruition. The author follows the basic elements of a lab report as it provides us
with a title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, and references.
With the introduction of the idea of the modernization of agriculture, both articles
introduce separate ideas that are relevant to the title that both articles give to the readers. The
articles share many similarities as both articles contain statistics and references to better help
describe the idea that they are trying to introduce at hand. The first article called “From DE-TO
Repeasantization: The Modernization of Agriculture Revisited.” which was written by Jan
Douwe Van der Ploeg provides us with several graphs and statistics as to how the modernization
process was carried out in European countries. These graphs even consisted of pictures of how
the process was carried out. The article also used references such as mentioning a Chinese study
on how to make more efficient agricultural departments in Europe. These aspects of the lab
report share similarities with the second article. The second article called “Responding to
Climate Change: Barriers to Reflexive Modernization in U.S. Agriculture” by Diana Stuart
introduced us to the idea of how modernization changes the perspective of climate change. The
article also contained statistics charts that were used to show how the use of pesticides and
fertilizers can increase the emissions rates. One such graph was named, “ “Nitrogen Fertilizer
Application Rates Compared Between Commercial and Seed Corn Farmers.” The authors of
both articles both used the same aspects of a lab report such as the title, abstract, introduction,
materials and methods, results, discussion, conclusion, and references.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.