Il coltivatore nella rete. Una messa a fuoco dei rapporti tra agricoltura e servizi nel secondo Novecento

The essay deals with the 1950s and 1960s, the most controversial phase of the "great transformation" of the Italian rural world. The development of external many external factors (technology, organizations, institutions, industry, and trade) reshaped the peasant and the capitalistic farms. Large changes occurred in the agricultural structures of contemporary Italy, such as the reduction of farms and the concentration of production in some regions; the disintegration of the extensive large estates (the so-called "latifondi"), the end of classical sharecropping, and the expansion of farm leasing and direct-management; the spreading of part-time and pluriactive farms; the demand for more professionalism in farming. The agricultural consumptions and their relations with the industrial sector are then considered, together with the role of new agricultural associations and special public entities "for the transformation of agriculture and land tenure ("enti di riforma agraria"). Other services to farms were offered by the machinery subcontracting - whose effects are, however, controversial. In conclusion, various interpretations about the changing relationships between the farm and its environment are recalled, from peasantization to the weakening of the farmer's independence.