[omegaworks]

>The rise of industrial farming can be attributed more to transportation than automation because it allowed corporations to form that could finance hundreds or thousands of farms across a region or continent.

Isn't the whole plot of The Grapes of Wrath about how the rise of industrial farming was due to the dust bowl disaster? Prior to that most citizens were small farmers, but with so many people intensively tilling grasslands a massive self-reinforcing dust storm formed and destroyed any ability to farm profitably at anything but a huge scale.