Student unrest and the dissatisfaction of activists with the performance of “the establishment” shook our society to its roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as underlying values and accepted concepts of right and wrong were criticized. Agriculture did not escape and is still widely criticized. Agro-ethics was born. Phrases sufficient to indicate the extent of the current concern about agro-ethics include: animal rights, environmental ethics, recombinant DNA, hard tomatoes/hard times, the export of our soil, energy ethics, Nestle and the multi-nationals, feeding the world's hungry, the plight of the small farm, helping the poorest of the poor, farmer-adapted technology, small is beautiful, and who controls U.S. agriculture.

Increased demand for U.S. farm exports—primarily food grains, feed grains, and oil crops—emerged as an important factor influencing food and agricultural research and education in the 1970s. Maintaining producers' revenue remained as a motivating force in agricultural research.

Adjustments in enterprise organization and resource use by firms in response to changing prices, yields, technology, and expectations are of interest to production economists and farm management specialists. Comparative statics has been the primary means of analyzing the impact of changes in these variables on the firm.

The impact of a monopolist or monopsonist on the price and output performance in comparison with perfectly competitive markets is well documented. These markets are coordinated through spot market exchanges.

It is an understatement to say that the Statistical Reporting Service is not the farmers' and ranchers' most popular USDA agency. Many agricultural producers are quick to express their concerns that SRS production reports have a negative impact on farm prices and farm incomes. There appears to be a widespread feeling among producers that release of information about their current and planned production levels results in a transfer of wealth from producers to other groups.

In general, people are aware of the rapid growth of urban areas, the spread of suburban developments, urban sprawl, strip developments, and extensive highway systems, but they are seldom aware of the extent to which prime agricultural land has been, and is being, diverted to these and other nonagricultural uses.

The focus of the typical Ph.D. program in agricultural economics is on research. Little emphasis is placed on teaching, and, in most cases, there is no emphasis on extension, thus placing the new extension specialist in a difficult starting position. Even so, the current order or priorities may be appropriate, because an extension specialist must first understand economic theory and then be a capable researcher and teacher to work effectively in an extension program (Hildreth and Armbruster, p. 857).

Economic analyses of typical farms are often useful in applied agricultural research, because agricultural policymakers and analysts have a particular need for information on policy impacts and indicators of well-being at the farm level.

Use of irrigation has been increasing rapidly in the Southeast. For example, irrigated acreage in Georgia increased by 20 percent in 1980, to 0.988 million acres (Skinner, 1981), and increased 16.5 percent in the previous year (Skinner, 1980). Research has been completed on the costs and profits of irrigated crops (Tew and Musser).

Exports have played an important role in the history of southern agriculture. C. E. Bishop noted more than two decades ago that “southern agriculture has a high stake in international trade.” In recent years, the effects of exports on the southern region have become even more pervasive. Rudd was recently led to observe that “the shift to a substantially greater involvement and interdependency of agriculture in international trade during the 1970s is perhaps the most far-reaching event of [that] decade.”

The literature of industrial organization is replete with analyses of the relationship between seller concentration and market performance. Most researchers have hypothesized a continuous linear relationship between profitability and concentration and have estimated that relationship accordingly.

Researchers as well as planners have been concerned with the impact of augmenting an existing recreation system with new recreational areas. That is, they are concerned with the substitution or duplication of services stemming from additional numbers of recreational areas.

Farm supply cooperatives provide farm inputs that are used by producers and nonproducers. The development and urbanization of many rural areas have caused farm supply cooperatives to be faced with more and more potential patrons who are not producers. The use of farm inputs by nonproducers has thus expanded the farm supply cooperatives' market potential, while threatening to force them out of what may be preferred tax status.

The dramatic surge of economic activity in the South is a relatively recent development. During the first half of the postwar period, the South, along with the Northeast and North Central region, lagged well behind the nation in population and employment growth (Table 1). It was only in the 1960s that rates of growth in the South began to exceed the national averages, and it was only in the 1970s that the South began to mount a serious challenge to the West for first place in regional growth. It also should be noted that the surge in southern growth was not uniformly distributed; most of it occurred in the region's two western subregions, the East South Central division and the energy-rich West South Central division.

Economic theory suggests that demand behavior is time variant, but does not offer much insight into the nature of the temporal variation. For practical purposes, at least two interpretations regarding the time behavior of demand relationships may be advanced.