Resulting Agricultural Success - Step 2

The Basic Issue

The success of the pursuit for excellence in education and research expressed itself in two main areas in the field of agriculture. First, it resulted in the development of new seed varieties and fertilizers which resulted in greatly improved yields for many types of field crops. A similar effect took place in the livestock industry. These increases in yield meant that the amount of land needed to be used to raise a given amount of crop dropped. However, land usage increased rather than dropped and a state of over-supply resulted which has been a constant factor over the years.

A second research success took place in the area of technology. Mechanization replaced animal energy to such a degree that far less laborers were needed on farms in order to raise crops and livestock, and millions of acres formerly used to raise feed for horsepower was freed up for other uses.

A combination of these two factors resulted in several effects:

  1. The effect of a dollar worth of purchased "inputs" of either or both of the above advances, had a far greater effect on the resulting yields than spending that same dollar on more hired labor of the human type. Human beings can only do so much work in relation to crops and their productivity in a given season. Once the two types of technological advances mentioned above crossed a threshold of the upper limits of human capacity to improve yield, the value of human labor dropped in the calculations of farm managers.

  2. A surplus of farm products (Tweeten estimates approximately 10% per year on average in the USA (___ )emerged and drove the prices for farm produce down to cost or below cost of production. The government was faced with having to somehow remove that surplus from the market in order to raise prices enough so that farmers would be able to keep farming. A variety of measures have been tried over the years:

    • Payments have been made for farmers to permanently remove marginal land from production and turn it to other non-crop production uses like forestry and waterfowl habitat.

    • Payments have been made to farmers to remove prime land from production for set contractual lengths of time (e.g. 5 or 10 years) for either all crops or specific crops which were in oversupply.

    • Surplus product was purchased from farmers by the government for social programs like school milk programs, United States food stamp programs, and overseas foreign aid programs.

    • Quotas on production were set and licenses to sell or licenses to produce were established with a variety of control mechanisms.

  3. Farmers increased their land base in order to take advantage of the larger acreage required in order to justify the expense of larger machines. If a large machine spent most of its working life sitting idle because it was under-utilized, then the high cost for it was hard to justify in an context of falling crop returns on that investment. One of the problems with farm machinery , particularly in the more northerly climate is that is needed at the same time by all farmers, which interferes with shared machinery. Some mutual assistance arrangements have been worked out and some custom combining work is done, but the weather is a considerable restriction on the window of opportunity at both ends of the crop year.

  4. Margins between the cost of production and return payments for crops have narrowed drastically. This has meant that the "buffer" farmers used to enjoy which allowed them to ride out a bad year are now narrowed. When the main inputs are land an labor, and much of the labor is ones own family, the it is easier to carry over until the next crop year than it is when the main inputs are purchased inputs, and those bills come due at he end of the season. Suppliers need their payments and are far less willing to wait than land and family labor.

    The degree of success in the pursuit of excellence in education and research is seen in the fact that the 10% per year surplus in production has persisted for years despite that fact that millions of acres are now out of production. Had they still been in production, the situation would have been much worse.

    Agricultural success was the second domino to fall in creating our present agricultural situation - step two - but its success drove a further dynamic which was to have even greater effects on both rural and urban society The subsequent population shift from the farms to the cities.

    Aspects of Agricultural Change