Water utilities are being subjected to progressively greater economic pressures. The demand for water is increasing, due to both a growing number of customers and rising per capita consumption. Consequently, many utilities are faced with declining reserves of water, necessitating additional investment to develop sources of supply. Frequently, new or enlarged facilities to treat, store and distribute the larger volume of water are required. Public policies, also, are promoting the extension or development of public water systems to serve sparsely populated suburban communities, small towns, and rural areas. All these changes affecting the demand for water, combined with rising construction costs, are causing water utility costs to skyrocket.

Pressures are increasing for reforms in financing of local government services. At the local level, the property tax is a major source of concern. Two major charges leveled against the property tax are (1) that the property tax is regressive and (2) that financing local government services through the property tax leads to inequities in services received.

The charge that the property tax is regressive stems from the fact that it is a tax on wealth and not on income. The amount of real property owned by a person is not necessarily proportional to his ability to pay taxes. Several studies have shown that property taxes are regressive; i.e., that low-income families pay a greater percentage of their income for public services than do middle- and upper-income families.

In many regions, irrigation water is pumped from an underground aquifer that receives little or no recharge. With an exhaustible water supply, water available in year t + 1 depends on quantity of water available in year t − 1 and the quantity withdrawn in year t. As the water supply decreases, pumping costs increase and returns to water and management decline.

The exhaustible nature of the water supply causes an especially difficult problem for the farm operator in that he must allocate water within and among years. In addition, the farm operator is faced with irrigation investment decisions; e.g., type of irrigation distribution system to use. He must consider simultaneously, labor intensive versus capital intensive systems and effect of each system on present value and economic life of his specific water supply. To manually evaluate the alternatives, making the necessary calculations would be prohibitive in terms of both cost and time.

Regulatory activity to maintain the status of the independent milk company as a viable competitive force in the milk industry has been a central focus of regulatory policy since the 1930's. Some authorities question the degree of emphasis on preservation under the law, but most feel that there is an important element of protection embodied in regulatory activity affecting the industry. We feel that this aspect of the law is important and is the focus of this article.

Legal protection of the independent dairy is afforded from three sources. The Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibits firms from discriminating in price where the effect may be to substantially lessen competition, has been enforced extensively by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on behalf of independent milk companies. For example, of 53 complaints filed by the FTC from June 1950 to June 1964, nine were against dairy companies. Independent firms have protected their own position under the law in treble damage private litigation. As a group, the national and regional dairy concerns have been involved in almost continuous treble damage litigation on charges of discriminatory pricing in recent years.

Issues ancient and modern in the structural organization of agriculture are newly being legitimized. As one evidence, hundreds of extension meetings this winter will utilize a new set of leaflets entitled, “Who Will Control Agriculture?”. In popular articles, speeches, and research reports various aspects of the question are being examined. Even Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, himself an agricultural economist, has proclaimed the relevance of the subject, not to mention his chief economist, Don Paarlberg, who has addressed the same subject frequently.

Among these several sources the focus varies: optimal size of farm or feedlot; tax issues; the comparative advantage of the corporate and other forms of organization; economies of vertical coordination; the nature of contractual integration; and bargaining power for farmers and farm workers.

Interrelationships among enterprises on individual farms complicates decision-making by the individual producers and efforts to estimate producer response to alternative farm programs. This is especially true for wheat producers, where wheat both competes with other field crops and can be used for grazing (an input to beef production). Acreage allocated to wheat provides little indication of the quantity of wheat grain that will be produced since stockers may be withdrawn from grazing wheat throughout the production period. Wheat output is determined by length of grazing. With sufficiently attractive cattle prices, relative to wheat prices, wheat may be used only for graze-out (no grain harvested). The actual outcome depends primarily on price of wheat, price of beef and the characteristics of the government wheat program.

It is well recognized that a number of factors, basically technological in nature but having significant economic effects, have made feasible a drastic restructuring of the fluid milk industry. This is the economic outgrowth of developments that have been shifting the economies of scale in processing sharply to the right, that have all but eliminated home route delivery, that have improved quality and shelf life of the product, and that have provided methods for handling and moving milk over wide areas at low costs.

Interregional trade and associated price differences between regions has been the subject of extensive economic analysis. Trade patterns reflect intraregional supply and demand conditions and transfer cost among regions. Once patterns of trade are established, price differences among regions simply reflect transfer cost from exporting to importing regions. But, patterns of trade do not necessarily remain stable over time.

Agricultural lending institutions are faced with a perpetual task of periodically evaluating personal and financial attributes of their borrowers. This examination is necessary in order to determine the present quality of the loans and to assess the current financial position of each borrower. Moreover, analysis of each borrower's financial performance establishes a basis for extending, limiting or withdrawing the present line of credit and for determining the amount and kind of supervision needed.

Producers within the cattle industry are faced with three major types of risks: (1) risks of losses in quality; (2) risks of quantity losses; and (3) losses resulting from unfavorable changes in cash prices. Quality and quantity risks are physical risks that can be dealt with through managerial techniques, adoption of new technology, and the use of fire, storm, and theft insurance. The risk associated with unfavorable price changes does not lend itself to an insurance approach. Producers must, therefore, become speculators in the cash market or choose to employ marketing strategies designed to transfer price risks to other market functionaries.

Location basis variability is a matter of potential concern to livestock producers who contemplate the use of livestock futures contracts as hedging devices and who are removed from a designated futures contract delivery point. Recent attention has been given this problem by Heifner in an analysis of minimum-risk hedging ratios for cattle and hogs, among other commodities, in which measures of risk-shifting effectiveness were generated for comparison among locations.

Public investments in natural resources have been used as a means to increase the economic base of specified areas and consequently to increase incomes and economic activity in affected areas. The proposed Principles for Planning Water and Land Resources makes explicit a national objective of natural resource development: To enhance regional development through increases in a region's income, increases in employment and improvement of the area's economic base.

Public expenditures for research and development have increased very rapidly in the last two decades. Despite the apparent high payoff from this research, there is an increasingly greater reluctance on the part of legislative groups and the general public to support such research. This problem revolves around the question of social priorities, but it also involves an assessment of the value of the research investment.

In recent months, several developments have prompted increased interest in the feedlot replacement decision. Among the more important are the high prices for feeder cattle and feed grains, the narrow (and often negative) profit margins confronting the feedlot manager and the increasingly apparent need to produce lean meat with maximum efficiency.

Applied economists are becoming increasingly aware of the need to document the social rates of return to investment in research and to analyze how the benefits and costs brought about by the adoption of a research product are distributed among affected groups. Relatively little empirical work has been done on these interrelated topics. Griliches made an early contribution to the subject of social rates of return in his essay dealing with the hybridization of corn.

Interregional and interseasonal competition in the U.S. beef industry have been studied extensively during the past decade. Linear programming, quadratic programming, simulation, and various other econometric models have formed the analytical frameworks in these studies.

Reactive programming was first introduced as a useful tool in analyzing interregional competition problems by Tramel and Seale in 1959. Since that time, it has been utilized on a limited basis in spatial analyses in general, and the beef sector in particular. Goodwin used reactive programming in analyzing feeder cattle distribution patterns in the Southwest. In 1972, King and Ho reported a revised reactive programming algorithm and three illustrations of its applicability.

Only recently have economists emphasized the human agent as a resource and the significance of human migration in promoting economic growth. Advances in technology, increased per capita income and population have all emphasized the necessity of labor force adjustment in our economy. Due to dynamic shifts in aggregate demand and supply functions, labor must be mobile to receive the maximum return possible for its contribution to gross national product. All comparable resources would receive the same returns when factor markets are in equilibrium, regardless of their use. While a textbook equilibrium is not likely to be observed in the U.S. labor market, it can be presumed that human migration is an equilibrating phenomenon.

Two events are occurring which could have a profound effect on the Florida tomato industry. One is the development of a technology for harvesting fresh-market tomatoes mechanically. The second is the development of wage legislation affecting farm workers. This paper is an attempt to evaluate the effect of different minimum wage levels on the rate of adoption of mechanical harvesting, and the subsequent effect on employment and earnings in the tomato industry.

Dairy farmers, as profit maximizers, are constantly striving to expand the income producing ability of their dairy herds. As managers of their business, their direct concern is to attain high production per cow and enhance the average quality of their herd by removal of the unprofitable producers. They are also striving to earn a large income above feed costs, since feed costs comprise 50 percent or more of the costs of production. This value must be high enough to pay for the other costs of production, including a return to capital and operators labor, to return a profit. Proper culling or the identification and subsequent removal of the lower producing cows from a herd is important because of the increased average milk production and the resulting increased income above feed costs.

The difficulties associated with improving forest management practices on land held by farmers and other small landowners have been well documented. In North Carolina roughly four-fifths of all forest area is to be found in such holdings. To evaluate alternative strategies for improving land management, it is important to have information concerning the rates of change in land use on existing units. Aerial photographs provide a valuable source of this information, especially when flights have been made over an area at regular intervals extending back over several decades. In general, such regularity of aerial photo flights does exist for the continental United States. This article describes the use of such photographic data to construct land-use transition matrices.