The Structural Power of Agribusiness in a Kansas Farming Town

Henry Fletcher, Brown University

The Great Plains, once a stronghold of agrarian populism, have become the most reliably Republican region in the United States. This political transformation must be situated in the enormous structural changes undergone by US agriculture, a key industry in the region. Since 1935, the number of American farms has declined by 72%, while their average size has grown by 364%. In other words, the smallholding farmers of the early 20th century, the political base of agrarian populism, have been replaced by ‘agribusiness,’ a capital-intensive and large-scale form of agriculture. The winners of this transition formed a powerful new ‘agribusiness elite,’ comprising commercial farmers and local business owners. This emergent class heavily supported local Republican candidates who promised to maintain low farmworker wages and minimal environmental regulations. Recent scholarship has argued that this elite leveraged its structural power–the ability to shape economic and political norms–to steer the Plains’ once radical farming communities into the Republican fold. However, the precise mechanisms through which agribusiness interests were transmitted to these communities remain unclear. To address this question, I will conduct ethnographic and archival fieldwork in a small Kansas farming town in the summer of 2025. The field site, called Concordia, has 5,004 residents and epitomizes the trends described above: The town has experienced dramatic agricultural consolidation and, since 1980, voted reliably Republican, casting 79.24% of its votes for Trump last year. My preliminary interviews with residents have revealed that agribusiness plays a dominant role in the town’s social and economic fabric.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 42. The Past and Present of Agribusiness