ABSTRACT
The "new industrial geography" represents a topical and theoretical shift away from prior themes in economic geography. Subsequent national and international integration of valley agriculture took two paths, one geographical and one structural. Moreover, regional restructuring, which concentrated power over valley agriculture in a few firms, had effects—because of the increasing national power of these strengthened firms—which have been widely propagated beyond the region in which they first appeared. Tracing this reintegration of agriculture and manufacture, the "higher synthesis," which Marx foresaw, requires an analysis of the farm sector which looks both within and beyond the farm enterprise itself. Without effective control over biological and chemical factors—crop genetics, plant nutrition, and disease and pest control—farmers could not accelerate or standardize agricultural production. High specialty crop prices in the immediate post-war years encouraged shifts to these crops and some fragmentation of larger dry-farms: the number of vegetable farms fell from 1945 to 1964 by only 21 percent.
