Farmland Daybreak

The sun stirs the entire ranch, bringing together the whole farm assembly, summoning the salivating inner beast from everyone as breakfast is soon poured into troughs or is thrown on a pan to sizzle into deliciousness. You can't help but be overwhelmed by the sweet smells coming from every corner and soon your soul is stretching its hands out to grab a fresh piece of crispy bacon. Farm control and ownership has traditionally been a key indicator of status and power, especially in agrarian societies. The distribution of farm ownership has historically been closely linked to form of government. Medieval feudalism was essentially a system that centralized control of farmland, control of farm labor and political power, while the early American democracy, in which land ownership was a prerequisite for voting rights, was built on relatively easy paths to individual farm ownership. However, the gradual modernization and mechanization of farming, which greatly increases both the efficiency and capital requirements of farming, has led to increasingly large farms. This has usually been accompanied by the decoupling of political power from farm ownership. In some societies, collective farming is the norm, with either government ownership of the land or common ownership by a local group. Especially in societies without widespread industrialized farming, tenant farming and sharecropping are common; farmers either pay landowners for the right to use farmland or give up a portion of the crops.