C. R. Enock, speaking as a conservationist in 1913, made a plea for the merging of the sciences into a new science “ …a comprehensive and constructive science whose aim would be to evolve and teach the principles under which economic equilibrium in the life of communities may be attained”. He stated, further:

…the real science of living on the earth, or “human geography,” the adaption of natural resources and national potentialities to the life of the community, has never been formulated. The congestion of the population in towns, the desertion of countryside, the high cost of living, low wages, unemployment and so forth are related phenomena, intimately connected with the conservation and development of natural resources …

There are no viable social structures in urbanized society that prevent urban people from providing their own needs in terms of food, fiber and recreation. Therefore, rural people will have to make a concerted effort if they are to fulfill any of the future needs of an urbanized society.

In the social institutional organization of urbanized society, food and fiber production are primarily integrated parts of general economic production of goods and services. In the United States, unlike many areas of the world, a major social equilibrium problem is over production of food and fiber. People and land are moved out of this area of economic activity. The affluent resources of the society are increasingly transferred to other social institutional areas.

Perhaps the first important question is, “Will the next few years be significantly different from those of the past decade”? Assuming that the world is not again engulfed in a war of major magnitude, it is probably safe to conclude that many of the agricultural problems of the 1960's will continue to be of importance well into the 1970's. The problems associated with a highly competitive industry in which output per man-hour of labor is increasing rapidly while the demand for its output is both inelastic and expanding slowly are not likely to disappear at an early date.

First let us focus attention on problem areas which may not be “new” in any basic sense of that word, but which are likely to be of increasing importance in the years immediately ahead.

For many years my interest in farm policy was focused on the substance of the issues we confronted. What were the alternative means by which the current questions could be answered? What were the consequences of the alternative solutions? But recently I have found myself focusing on a different set of questions. These questions have to do, not with the substance of the items that happen to be on the agenda, but with the makeup of the agenda itself. How did the present questions get on the agenda? Who is intent on keeping them there? What other questions are there, questions not on the agenda? Who wants to put them on? In short, are we asking the right questions? Many years of teaching have convinced me that it is very difficult to get the right answer if we ask the wrong questions.

In past decades, agricultural policy was always thought of as policy toward farmers who produce our food and fiber or other rural people who depend on farmers for their livelihood. Accordingly, past policies were translated into programs of research, education, electrification, price supports, and related commodity programs.

After a time, it was realized that many farmers did not benefit from price and income programs in particular. They lacked the resources to enter the commercial market through which price programs operated. It was decided that the problems facing these people called for credit and other special programs to help them graduate into the commercial field.

A desire for betterment is basic to humanity. Such longings envision betterment not only for a current generation but more deeply seek for posterity a manner and quality of life that fully rationalizes man as a creature of God. It is in man's moments of silence, his periods of meditation, his time of dreaming that hopes and aspirations and ideals take shape and gain form and substance. And though they be folly to some, history adequately documents that the dreams of one generation become the goals of another and the realities of yet a third. Those of us in agriculture are no different from the rest; we have ideals and goals and hopes and dreams that can be realized or thwarted by federal agricultural policy. As society is not static, neither is agriculture; and if it is to be a full contributor in this dynamic age, renewal must come from debate and argument to produce the melding of ideas essential to progress.

An implicit theme of industrialization in agriculture has run throughout much of the literature in agricultural economics since 1950. Maybe we have been lulled by the future tense used in the literature. Industrialization is here and much of the process has taken place without an update on patterns of thought or assessment of implications for present or future agricultural business environment. Possibly, those of us in agricultural economics research, teaching or extension at land grant colleges have undergone much less impact and reorientation than those we serve, and, theoretically, lead in thought.

In spite of the volume of literature produced over the years reflecting concern over the present state of the arts, the situation is likely to continue. However, there are several new ideas that offer some promise for improving our understanding and ability to project new relationships in the agribusiness sector of the Southern region.

Although the title of this article implies a one-way set of forces working from agricultural industrialization to market structure, some of our colleagues regard this relationship as a two way process with forces at work in each sector having strong impacts on the other. It is these interdependencies that make the task of model building so difficult and empirical analysis so complex.

Industrialization is a synonym for the industrywide adoption of the systems approach to production. Agriculture in the South will approach the highly organized state currently exhibited by broiler and hog producers, and perhaps pulp and sugar and some cattle feeding operations. I shall define the two terms “industrialization” and “capital” quite briefly, and proceed to a discussion of effects such a development might have on capital requirements.

In general, industrialization means an increase in the degree of organization, the coherence and internal dependence between separable parts of a production process.

Today, the need for economic development is self-evident to the millions of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America who suffer from malnutrition, are ill-housed, poorly educated, and either unemployed or grossly underemployed. The ultimate objective of economic development is to raise the standard of life – the quality of life - for the mass of the people, to widen their area of choice, to open up new opportunities for human well-being. The less developed countries have two-thirds of the 3.5 billion people but receive only 12.5 percent of the world's gross national product. Life appears to be an economic treadmill with the future blighted by an excessive rate of population growth for millions of people. India provides a good illustration of the problem. With an estimated population of 525 million at mid-1968, India had 15 percent of the world's population, 2.4 percent of the world's land area, hardly 2 percent of the world's income, and an annual per capita income level of around $75.

Providing a sustained flow of improved physical, biological and social technology applicable to the country or region is essential in the strategy of agricultural development. Building research institutions, which have the capacity to supply this flow, has accounted for a large proportion of Land Grant University overseas technical assistance effort. Several papers and broad spectrum studies have attempted to review the experience to date with a view to inducing more productive effort. We shall (a) identify the main issues relating to required features of effective research institutions, (b) examine the history of American reasearch institutions for insight into the bases of effectiveness, (c) inventory institution-building attempts in Asian situations with regard to presence of these bases of effectiveness and (d) evaluate and interpret alternative policies of foreign assistance to build effective research programs in agriculture. Primary attention is focused upon one organizational aspect which appears to be both limitational and neglected – the engineering of dependable responsiveness of the institutions to the problems of their respective regions.

Colombia, South America is one of the select countries around the world which has been singled out for intensive developmental inputs on the part of public agencies and institutions, private enterprise and the Foundations. Among the external agencies currently involved in the Colombian development effort are FAO, the Mid-American State University Association (MASUA) administered by Nebraska, an International Tropical Research Institute, the Harvard Development Advisory Service, the Population Council, the Ford, Kellogg and Rockefeller Foundations, and various national development organizations, including those of Sweden and France. Obviously, with such a diversity of endeavor, consideration must necessarily be limited to agriculture, with emphasis on the current Nebraska-MASUA consortion program.

Many features incorporated in the Food and Agriculture Act of 1965 were previously tested for feed grain and wheat but used little, if at all, for controlling production and supporting incomes from cotton. The Act included additional provisions specifically applicable to cotton. The following analysis is directed toward appraising the effects of the Act on cotton production, on the income of cotton producers, and on Government costs.

The Agriculture Act of 1965 marked a major change in the emphasis of farm programs. It was the first legislation to officially recognize (by legislation for a 4-year program) that the surplus production of specific commodities was not a temporary problem that could be solved with temporary programs.

While attempting to quantify and examine the distribution of payments from the 1968 Upland Cotton Program, some comparisons will be made of the distributive aspects of previous cotton programs.

Economists have long been concerned with the impact of government farm programs, but have focused much of their attention on resource use and aggregate returns under alternative programs. At the same time, it has been recognized that farm programs, through income transfers, had certain distributive impacts. One of the first and most comprehensive studies of the distribution of benefits from certain farm programs was conducted by James T. Bonnen.

Recently renewed interest has been shown in new programs for United States Agriculture. Long-term cropland retirement is one of the proposals that has received serious consideration.

This report presents for consideration some insight gained on only one facet of general cropland retirement. Selecting which cropland to retire and its effect on the South in particular, have been considered under two different criteria. Both criteria retire cropland and production but the emphases differ.

The impact of technological advance in reducing the need for agricultural land has been more or less recognized since at least the early 1950s. After experiments with general cropland retirement in the 1956-60 Conservation Reserve Program, U. S. farm policy turned to annual acreage adjustments, commodity by commodity. Now farm policy proposals once again include the general cropland retirement approach, either alone or in combination with annual commodity programs.

Burley tobacco is a major crash crop in Kentucky, middle and eastern Tennessee, and Southwestern Virginia. Burley tobacco acreages and the farm acreage distributions of burley tobacco have been determined by the United States Department of Agriculture since 1933. In 1966, approximately 250,000 acres of burley tobacco was alloted to farmers in the United States.

The purpose of burley acreage allotments has been to equate the supply and demand for burley tobacco at a price considerably higher than that which a free market would establish.

Since 1960, data from “typical” enterprise budgets have been used extensively in several studies dealing with a wide variety of problems. Budgets were compiled in cost-of-production studies by Green, Pierce and Williams, Coutu and Mangum and the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service. Without surprise, extensive use of these budgets has focused attention on their limitations.

More extensive and precise field measurements were needed for several cost items, particularly labor costs. In addition, certain types of cost-input or cost-output relationships were implicit in such constant-type coefficients—relationships which may or may not exist in reality. It may be true, for example, that X hours of priming labor are required to harvest Y pounds of tobacco, but it might require α + 1.8X hours to harvest 2Y pounds.

Two years ago, in his presidential address, Dr. C. E. Bishop told members of the American Agricultural Economics Association that “… our preoccupation with the problems of the farm firm has resulted in little or no attention to problems that are much more important to the majority of the rural population”.

Preoccupation with the farm firm is evident in our traditional approach to the study of incomes of farm people. There is still a tendency to look at the incomes of farm firms rather than at the incomes of people who farm. Present income statistics are oriented to the farm firm in a way that makes it fairly difficult to study the economic well-being of people involved in farming.

Because of the awareness of the importance of non-urban land uses, many States have turned to use value assessment (as opposed to assessment at market value) as one method of maintaining open space. For example, see “Taxation of Farmland in the Rural-Urban Fringe” by Thomas F. Hady and Thomas F. Stinson, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, A. E. Report No. 119, 1967. in response to such actions, many researchers have addressed themselves to the effectiveness of use value assessment in maintaining open space. The effectiveness of use value assessment in keeping land open is not in question in this discussion. Suffice to say that the effectiveness of use value assessment in maintaining open space is a highly debatable issue on both economic and political grounds.