Responsible and informed individuals and groups now view the prospective balance between the world's demand and supply for food for the next decade quite differently. There are those who view the recent short-falls in production relative to desired consumption as relatively temporary in nature and that the most likely course of events is stocks of grain will be rebuilt and grain prices will decline to more usual levels over the next year or two. Those who argue this position consider the present situation as primarily a temporary aberration, of which there have been several others in recent history. At the turn of the present century the British were concerned that the demand for wheat was going to outpace the supply; after World War II there was deep concern about the problems of rebuilding agriculture in Europe and, somewhat later, meeting the increased demand for food due to the sharp increase in birth rates that occurred in both industrial and developing countries, and in the mid-1960's, following unfavorable crops in the Soviet Union, China and South Asia it was feared that the world faced famine on a large scale. Yet, following each, the course of events was feared that the world faced famine on a large scale. Yet, following each, the course of events was quite the opposite and grain and food prices fell and the concern of governments was to protect their farmers from the consequences of supply growing more rapidly than demand.

This paper is an outgrowth of an Economic Research Service study undertaken in 1974 with the cooperation of the Foreign Agricultural Service and the Agricultural Marketing Service. Many individuals, including the authors of this paper, were involved in the comprehensive study of the impact of dairy imports on the U.S. dairy industry (Agricultural Economic Report No. 278, January 1975). This presentation reflects one part of the overall study.

Apple production in Connecticut averaged 49.4 million pounds a year during the last decade. Most of these – approximately 80 percent of the total production – are sold for fresh use.

American agricultural production is viewed by starving masses in the world as a great white knight; it can come charging into their lives and rescue them from starvation, malnutrition, and misery. Over the years we have maintained a granary that fed many millions of starving people. Now that these granaries are essentially depleted, there is a demand on the part of the World Health Organization, members of Congress and others that we replenish these reserves and continue to serve this role, rescuing people from starvation.

Milk has both suffered and enjoyed from more price and quality regulation than almost any other farm product in the United States.

Despite these regulations, or perhaps because of them, competition among producers still closely approximates a competitive model. In New England, milk price fluctuations are dampened but production is primarily a matter of economic survival. No government regulation limits entry, exit, or volume of production as long as minimum quality standards are maintained.

Apple production in Massachusetts has remained relatively stable for the past sixty years at about 2.7 million bushels annually, while output of most other agricultural enterprises in the state has declined. For a variety of reasons, Massachusetts apple growers have been better able to compete with other producing regions. Among the technological adjustments which have occurred, has been an expanded use of semi-dwarf rootstock resulting in a higher density of trees planted per acre. Changes also continue to be made in varieties of apples planted, reflecting both changing consumer tastes and improved varietal selections.

The Commodity Economics Division of ERS has recently embarked on the development and implementation of a systematic approach to the construction and maintenance of agricultural enterprise data. This paper describes this system, its objectives, dimensions, some problems anticipated in its operation and some of the potential direct and indirect benefits expected for the profession.

The question of the operational objectives of small holder, “peasant” farmers has received considerable attention in the literature of agricultural development and production economics. Justification could not be made for rehashing this old issue, were it not for almost universal incomplete specification by most writers on the subject. No writer denies the dual nature of the peasant household, but few have made a serious attempt theoretically, and even less empirically, to integrate consumption activities into an analytical framework of the small farm.

The Housing Act of 1954 authorized the federal government to subsidize municipal planning programs. As a result, planning firms produced “comprehensive plans” for rural towns at an increasing rate. After a decade of experience with these HHFA “701” “comprehensive” town plans, it became evident that there was a wide variation in quality and content of the plans. Plans varied from useful tools for guiding growth to useless documents containing no meaningful recommendations. The latter situation resulted when urban planners drafted plans for rural areas based on urban concepts with no significant input by local people. Also, administrators of the “701” program and students of regional planning had no accepted criteria to distinguish an acceptable rural town plan from a useless compilation of data. This situation allowed planners who lacked rural planning know-how to use urban planning concepts to develop nonrelevant “shelf” plans in performance of their “701” contracts. By 1968 this problem was generally recognized. As a result, a research project was developed at the University of Vermont (Hatch 212), to study town plans and planning. The project had two objectives: (1) to evaluate adopted rural town plans by measuring the quality and content of plans, thus separating implementable plans from nonimplementable plans, and plans with considerable content from plans with little content, and (2) to develop planning concepts and procedures relevant to rural areas. This paper is a progress report on the first objective—a proposal of a town plan analysis and evaluation system.

The expanding volume of solid wastes generated in the United States, with its accompanying health hazards and pollution dangers, has led to concern among public agencies and private citizens alike. It has been estimated by, for example, that the combined effect of increasing population and increasing per capita consumption in the United States has been an increase from 70 million to 175 million tons of solid waste generated annually during the period 1940 to 1970. In Massachusetts, an estimated 7.5 million tons of non-agricultural wastes were generated in 1970, and this volume is projected by to double by the year 2000. Nationally, public expenditures for solid waste collection and disposal services for most communities are exceeded only by spending on the two categories of education and roads.

Problems in the delivery of community services to rural areas have received increasing attention in recent years. One concern has centered on questions of use, availability, accessibility, satisfaction, and problems in use by consumers, while a second focus has been on provider organization. A third important focus has been on the role of services in development of a community. Does service “mix” (amount of services provided in a community) have an effect on growth or decline of the community? Conversely, does growth or decline of the community have an effect on service mix? These are at least three more specific dimensions of the larger complex issue of service delivery for rural areas.

Natural resources play a role in economic development, but the exact nature and importance of that role is a matter of dispute. The spectacular development of natural resource poor Japan compared with a, say, relatively well endowed Argentina certainly indicates that the lack of resources need not undully hinder development while their abundance does not insure rapid growth. Much of the difference lies, undoubtedly, with the human and institutional factors.

While many people would argue that absolute deprivation has been eliminated from this country, poverty, or relative deprivation, still exists. Recognition of this problem is not new Despite public policies to redistribute income, the public's demand for lessened personal income inequality has never been completely satisfied.

Many persons in rural areas in the U.S. are dependent largely on labor earnings for their economic well-being. Seventy-five percent of the 14.8 million rural nonfarm persons and fifty-two percent of the rural farm persons 16 years old and over who were employed in 1969 were employed as wage and salary workers. Of the 1.6 million rural nonfarm families with incomes less than the poverty level in 1969, 51 percent had male heads less than 65 years of age, and 71 percent of these male heads were in the labor force in 1969. Sixty-seven percent of the 442,000 rural farm families with incomes less than the poverty level had a male head less than 65 years old and 81 percent of these male heads were in the labor force in 1969.

The objective of this paper is to compare alternative ways of reducing the input of biologically available phosphorus to Cayuga Lake from the Fall Creek watershed. This watershed covers 125 square miles, contains 130 dairy farms, has a population of 12,000, and is one of the major tributaries of the lake. Comparisons are made on the basis of the cost per pound of biologically available phosphorus prevented from entering the lake. Four sources of phosphorus, three of them farm-related, are considered: (1) land runoff as related to soil erosion; (2) land runoff as related to manure applications; (3) barnyard runoff; and (4) municipal sewage.

Interest in land-use planning and control in the United States has recently shifted to a variety of non-conventional tools in an attempt to attain results that have eluded older techniques such as traditional zoning. A major land-use objective has been to continue certain existing land uses in the face of market pressures to convert to more intensive uses. This has been the case, for example, with ecologically fragile areas such as wetlands, or environmentally valuable areas such as scenic land, which are also economically attractive for development into housing or industrial property. In recent years interest has also turned to preservation of agricultural land, particularly in areas near urban concentrations that are feeling the effects of urban sprawl.

The inshore lobster fishery is one of the more important ones in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, accounting for approximately 14 percent of the total landed value of all species in Massachusetts in 1971. Until recent years this fishery accounted for virtually all the pot landings in the state. Despite numerous attempts at conservation such as gear regulation, size restrictions, and prohibitions on harvesting egg-bearing females, the fishery has been subject to rapidly increasing effort and virtually constant landings. In the past decade it has become obvious to many fishery biologists and economists that conservation of fish stocks is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for fisheries management. Resource managers have become increasingly aware of the interdependence between economic factors and the intensity, location and composition of fishing effort.

Present Federal legislation imposes stringent water quality standards on point source emissions from agricultural operations. In the future, individual states may propose policies which are even more restrictive. A number of studies have examined the normative responses to antipollution regulations at the individual farm level (e.g. Ashraf and Christensen for the Massachusetts dairy industry; Gaede for the Massachusetts egg industry). These studies assumed that individual benchmark farms would achieve compliance with pollution standards by adopting the least cost alternative disposal method. They permitted as activities in a linear programming framework only those waste disposal practices considered capable of meeting regulations.

Farm employment fell from 12.8 million workers in 1929 to 4.4 million in 1974. One frequent explanation for this drastic drop in employment is the replacement of labor inputs in this sector by cheaper and more productive capital inputs. Assuming the farm labor market was in equilibrium at the start of this substitution process (admittedly a weak assumption but not crucial to this paper) the farm workers forced out of their chosen occupations were the most apparent losers in the process. If labor's share of the farm income dollar did not decrease as rapidly as the number of workers, then the remaining farm workers would be one group of beneficiaries of the process. Another would be society in general if total productivity increased. This paper will examine another potential group of beneficiaries, the shareholders and workers in the rest of the economy whose business and employment are tied to the provision of fixed capital inputs for the farming sector. Data availability, unfortunately, only allows us to identify economic implications for these groups at one point, 1971, in this ongoing process of transition. Nevertheless, these results are of interest since the groups who have benefited have not likely changed and our understanding of the rural adjustment process as well as the impact of technological innovations may be enhanced.