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Abstract
The persistence and transformation of family farms in industrialized countries challenges-our understanding of capitalist change. Capital-intensive, irrigated crop production on the Southern High Plains seemingly would lead to the disappearance of petty commodity producers and the vertical integration of farming into capitalist corporations. Yet farms remain for the most part family businesses, independent and reliant on family members for labor. Alternative explanations privilege either the competitive strength of internal family labor relations or natural constraints to industrial appropriation of surplus. In this paper, I use a regional, historical, empirical analysis to investigate interactions between farm families and market economies leading to the reproduction of family farming. By integrating uneven regional development and intergenerational farm reproduction mediating processes are discovered that help explain both the persistence of petty commodity production and its vulnerabilities.