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Ever since their field of learning took its own identity, agricultural economists have seen themselves as dedicated to the scientific principle. In early years that commitment was trusted as a guard against human fallibility, and the more so as the first investigations relied heavily on statistical data and analyses—supposedly bias-free. Thus originated a lasting emphasis on the quantitative. A need for underlying economic principles, recognized at once, was developed in depth beginning in the 1950s. Research taxonomies, outlined in the 1920s, devolved later into an array of research methods. Scientific practice is viewed also as how scientists "behave," and writings about agricultural economists' record are couched in terms of values, objectivity, ethics. Despite just claims to systematic rigor, science responds also to unsystematic elements, among them imagination and hunch. Most engaging in literature are never-ending exchanges about the merits of mathematics and model building.

When I finished I ended at the spot I always end. It is to regret once again that economics as a field of study ever became detached from political economy. No credit is due Jevons and others who declared the economy to be reducible to a set of mathematical equations. Jevons, it may be remembered, explained that "economy, if it be a science at all, must be a mathematical science" (quoted by Gray, p. 341). So it is that many mainstream economists, who have not advanced an inch or a centimeter in

It is a signal event that our topic should be included on this program. In recent years, the livestock and poultry economy has scarcely been considered in the making of price and income policy for feed grains. It has been disregarded by pragmatic policy makers. It has been almost equally bypassed by theoretical economists, who usually kibitz freely. Policy for support and target prices for corn, grain sorghums, and other feed grains has been made with an eye almost exclusively fixed on the producers of those crops. The target price has been set relatively high in order to protect crop farmers' income. The latest (and current) loan rate policy has been to hold the rate low. Although a low rate facilitates moving grain into livestock and poultry consumption when crops are abundant, it does nothing to provide buffer stocks for years when crops are short. In addition, a couple of years ago it became administrative policy to dispose of the stocks inherited from an earlier period, even subsidizing their sale abroad. But the foremost example of one-sidedness is the attitude toward release prices. In all the rhetoric heard recently about the peril of holding corn or sorghums in reserve, the scold has been that release prices would not be set high enough. What group can the spokesmen have had in mind? Feed producers, of course! Not feed consumers, that is, livestock and poultry men. It has been a one-sided consideration of a two-sided issue. If all groups are to have equal voice in policy making, how can livestock and poultry interests be so ostracized? The one-sidedness has more impact now that so much livestock and poultry production has become detached from feed supply on individual farms. The livestock-poultry economy is therefore more sensitive to the availability and price of feed. It is in fact a contradiction that historically, livestock and poultry got more attention when they were still closely connected with feed production on the farm. In the early years of farm programs, the "ever-normal granary" was consciously designed to level out the supply and price of feed for livestock and poultry. Now that livestock and poultry have become more commercial and more vulnerable to a volatile feed situation, feed price stabilization has been progressively removed from the councils of farm policy. And the ultimate contradiction is that the alleged price-depressing perils of a feed reserve have been proclaimed in disregard of the fact that the main defense of feed grain producers' incomes is the target price-direct payment mechanism, not support prices. If grains on reserve should cause market prices to be reduced below target level, producers would get bigger direct payments, that is, producers with a base on their farm are protected in that way. Admittedly, production outside such a base would not be eligible for payment.

For many years abundant and relatively inexpensive industrial raw materials contributed to a resource environment favoring industrialization of U.S. agriculture. Their gradual depletion and rising prices now create a counter pressure. The pace of industrialization has slowed, with different manifestations in the three economies of agriculture—crops, livestock, and marketing. The economics of extractive industries, a subject long neglected, will henceforth be an integral part of the economics of agriculture. Cited here are conceptual formulations the author published in a precursor article of 1962, formulations that go back to the "empty economic boxes" and the writings of Joan Robinson.

Seniority is a status of ambiguous appeal, but the happenstance of my having been on the farm policy scene from the earliest New Deal days has been felicitous. We veterans of the 1930s will never lose our poignant memory of the circumstances of the time. Whether we can communicate the atmosphere, the nuances, of those intense days is another question. For my part, I will try. The New Deal story is worth the telling. The New Deal introduced a conceptualization of the governmental role in the economy that was truly revolutionary. Essentially, during New Deal years citizens invested the federal government with responsibility for performance of the economy, and the government accepted it. In 1980-81 President Reagan as candidate and initially as president announced a divestiture, but in 1983 (State of the Union message) he explicitly returned to the position first taken by the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. The federal government assumes a responsibility. In telling the New Deal story I will interweave three themes. The first is that the eco

The American farm has never been as homoge neous or as stable as it appears in nostalgic recollection. Its historic emphasis on fee simple ownership by operating proprietors was nevertheless a marked departure from its feudal antecedent and remains relevant today. Farmers' desires for status and for managerial independence have not mitigated. They are subject to (1) changes, such as increase in size, that have no deep significance; and (2) other changes, such as increased dependence on nonfarm inputs, that bring more specialization of enterprise, including growing detach ment of livestock (and poultry) farming from crop farming, and that make farming more sensitive to the terms of relation ship with input-supplying as well as market industries. En croachment of those industries via vertical integration (ownership or contract) along with internal growth of some farms to larger than family size gradually shrink the domi nance of the traditional family farm. Even so, the most viable unit may be the part-time or retirement farm, which does not depend heavily on farm income. The ultimate question re lates to what national policy is to be. Past policy has been ambivalent, and no clear direction for the future is to be seen.

Virtually every economic situation in agriculture has an unmatched pair of implications that may be called the proximate and the ultimate. Devaluation of the fixed assets of agriculture has a meaning of enormous significance in the here-and-now — the proximate. It bears not so much on impersonal gross measures of productivity and output but on the human element. Loss of farm asset values is a major blow to the hopes and aspirations of hundreds of thousands of farmers, bringing intense emotional distress and even suicides.

present an idea in a favorable context he identifies it in purr words. If derogation is intended, snarl words are employed, Gray said. For a title to this session a choice among purr words is available. It could address regulatory reform or deregulation. The former was opted for. The term is the more accurate technically, but it has the further quality that it is so accommodating. It is malleable, elastic, ambiguous. Unfortunately, though, it is often regarded as synonymous with its alternate, deregulation. Sorenson, in his paper, is careful to dissociate regulatory reform from deregulation. The issue discussed does not fall into a regulation-deregulation dichotomy, he insists. "It is not a regulation versus deregulation debate but rather a search for that set of operating rules that most nearly fits collective concepts of equity, economic efficiency, and productivity growth." Yea, verily; but few commentators on transportation policy nowadays are so perceptive. Even the other papers in this set, those by Beilock, Freeman, and Fuller, and by Beilock and Casavant, are written as inquiries into alleged or real blessings of deregulation. The authors find the blessings to be real and considerable. To be sure, in the two papers protective caveats are thrown in at the end, but the authors extrapolate to a generalized endorsement of transport deregulation. My position regarding transportation policy has been favorable to regulatory reform on the terms I would specify but totally opposed to deregulation as a sweeping principle. I am particularly opposed to the revisionism in the Staggers Act as administered by an Interstate Commerce Commission that, in my judgment, displays ineptitude. The three papers are interesting and useful commentaries but it would be unscholarly to expand a couple of years' experiences in Kansas wheat and West Coast or Florida fruit, or even the several rural community trucking studies, into a generalized judgment on a naional transportation policy. I offer this caution on the basis of three reasons. First, the studies are essentially beforeand after-("' 'deregulation"). Temporal comparisons always violate the ceteris paribus condition for research. This axiom particularly applies to transportation studies made before and after so-called deregulation. In rail, the Staggers Act came into being almost precisely at the time rail carriage shifted from shortage to surplus. Although rate bureaus contributed to pre-Staggers inflexibility of rail freight r tes, by and large it was easy to keep rates high when freight cars were scarce. In fact, it is likely that rates would have been even higher w re it not for the regulatory restraints. Then when cars became super-surplus, there would have been pressure to ease rates without Staggers Act. The situation in rail freight changed so dramatically after Staggers that it would be irresponsible to attribute all post-Staggers events to the Staggers law. Moreover, we may find irony in the high probability that the lower rates the last couple of years would have represented an even sharper reduction, had the decline begun from a nonregulated starting point. By and large, regulation tends to keep the overall level of rates below what it would otherwise be during shortage of carriage, and higher during Harold F. Breimyer is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Missouri.

At the risk of sounding unscholarly, the opening line can well be, "So what else is new?" Big companies invest and develop markets wherever they can by whatever means is available or can be contrived. They exhibit no chauvinistic concern for national boundaries. Their transnational aggressions can disturb both bureaucrats and economists, for the trenchant reason that our economic thinking is geared to the political unit that marks our era in history, namely, the nation-state. We are not schooled for global geo-economic analysis.

The more inquisitive scholars among the human species have searched from earliest times for universal, catholic ideas that bridge race, place, and language. A natural topic is man’s food supply—its origin, enhancement, and distribution. Beliefs about the topic have ranged from superstition to sophisticated science.