Empirical evidence of the development of productivisit agriculture in the European Union and The United States

As the dimensions of productivist Agricultural such as Intensification, Concentration and Specialization when taken together have produced an industrialization of agriculture. Intensification can be measured either by increased farm input or farm output per hectare of agriculture land. Concentration in agriculture describes the increasing proportion of total productive resources or farm production located in a smaller number of census units, such as parishes or counties. Specialization in agriculture is based on the economics of scale that can be gained by limiting production to a few products in a farm business, thus specialization can be observed in the functions of the labor force, the types of farm equipment employed, and the resulting land use. When aggregated for groups of farms, increasingly specialized and differentiated agricultural regions can be identified.

Reference to the increasing importance of the commodity chain and the agrofood complex, here three type of external capital has become particularly important: agro-food companies, food retailers and the financial services sector. The damaging environmental effects of modern agriculture can be understood as the outcome of manipulating agro-ecosystems for financial gain. The most important one of change to occur during the productivist era was the increased pressure to the farmers to alter their behavior towards the natural environments. The term external cost implies the consequences of the damage caused to the environment by the farm sector are met by society at large.

State intervention in agriculture has increasingly determined the economic context for agricultural production and a useful analytical structure is providing by the following linked sequence: agricultural policy goals, policy instruments and policy impacts. On agriculture policy goals a distinction can be drawn between utility and equity goals: utility goals concern the contributions by the farm sector towards the performance of the economy; equity goals focus on the provision of satisfactory incomes for the farm populations. The policy goals can be classified into four main groups: instrument to increasing demand, instrument to reduce supply, instrument to raise farm income by reducing production costs and, instrument to conserve the natural environment.

Studies on the political impacts of state intervention have tends to emphasize three features:
1. Most policy mechanism influence the general economic environment for agricultural within which farmers make decisions about what to produce and in what quantity. Thus the state can increasing or decreases the element of risk in farmer decision making.
2. The state can encourage farmers to change their productions and farming practices in preferred directions by offering specific financials inducements.
3. The state can legislate on specific regulations that dictate farmer behavior, such as production quota and set-aside.