This dissertation presents a review of three major Marxist perspectives concerning the future of family farming as a form of simple commodity production and presents and tests a revised perspective within the context of Iowa agriculture. Data for the analysis come from quinquennial censuses of Iowa agriculture for the years 1940-1982;The dissertation follows the three article format. The first paper proposes two processes which exploit simple commodity producers: (1) the production of absolute surplus-value through the formal subsumption of their commodified labor and (2) the production of relative surplus-value through the real subsumption of their commodified labor. Under this view, the three mechanisms by which the surplus production of farmers may be appropriated by capital include: (1) unequal exchange, (2) ground rent, and (3) technological rents;The main arguments presented in the first paper are: (1) Full subsumption of agricultural production under capitalism need not result in the complete separation of simple commodity producers from their farms. (2) Simple commodity production is presently differentiated into a class structure of rural semiproletarians, simple commodity producers, and semicapitalist producers. (3) This process of differentiation varies according to the phases of the long wave of late capitalist development, resulting in the combined and uneven development of agricultural production;The second paper summarizes the propositions of the first and tests them within the context of Iowa agriculture for the period 1959 through 1982. Changes in the differentiation of simple commodity production agriculture are found to vary consistently with the phases of the long wave of late capitalist development. Changes are found in the centralization and concentration of semicapitalist producers, the regression of simple commodity producers, and the proletarianization of small producers;Using a discrete time, stationary Markov chain, the third paper projects and models the structure of Iowa agriculture for the year 2000. With the increasing concentration and centralization of farms in the large farms-size category, one witnesses the regression of farms in the medium farm-size category, as well as an increase in the farms in the small farm-size category and this varies consistently with the phases of the long wave of late capitalist development.