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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.

Energy is a complex and pervasive subject, whose frontiers are still in the process of being defined. Many of the data are in dispute. Technical judgments do not agree. Conflicts of interest abound. The Nixon Administration, in its allocation plans for summer 1973 and January 1974, gave farmers top priority for fuel – ahead of hospitals, firemen, and police. Critics called this “cockeyed,” preferring to put other sectors of the economy ahead of agriculture.

Rural areas and rural traditions are enjoying a new respect. Though the origin may lie partly in counterattraction to urban frustrations, the outcome is to generate urban support for public rural programs. Rural people find themselves reacting ambiguously, as the support comes at the price of more urban involvement in rural policy making. Nevertheless, the urban voice may not prove as devastating as rural interests have feared: and rural people including farmers, can retain considerable influence provided they play the ageless political game of concession and compromise. In the past, they have shown considerable virtuosity in doing that.

THE significance to the economics of production of the patterns in which the productive elements are combined has long been recognized. This phenomenon, and its corollary, the varying returns to any single element, have been treated either as studies of individual operations or as hypothetical schedules for an entire industry set up for classroom illustration.' This paper represents an attempt to derive comprehensive ratios between the elements of production for a selected industry, the livestock industry. It therefore is associated with the second of the two customary methodologies. But it extends beyond the hypothetical level of exposition, for factual data are utilized. One approach to the subject would be to assemble and summate all available experimental data on feeding livestock. More recently there have been studies of a somewhat different type, the most publicized of which is one relating to dairying conducted jointly by the Bureaus of Agricultural Economics and Dairy Industry.'2 In this study observations of the relationship of feed input to milk production at varying intensities of feeding were made at 10 State Experiment Stations on cows maintained under carefully regulated experimental conditions. The control of the intensity of feeding is the unique and most important feature of the study. The results provide the most useful data for a given class of livestock that are available.

In the non-farm sector of the economy, cycles in individual industries such as housing and textiles, and in such areas as investment and inventory accumulation, are well known. The business cycle itself dominates all other cycles. In agriculture cyclicality finds much expression. The cattle cycle is the classic example.1 Other cyclical patterns also are numerous, although not so clearly demonstrated nor so well advertised as that for cattle.

Each generation believes it has a monopoly on crises. Its spokesmen declare how exceptional are the perils of its day. Crossroads are invariably said to loom ahead.It is, therefore, with diffidence that I declare my uneasy feeling that our nation is approaching a crisis decision as to the kind of economy and kind of government that are to prevail through ending years of our century. I am not timid to the point of silence because I have not customarily played a Cassandra role. My direst warnings have been of prospective demise of central markets for setting cattle prices.

Formal economics has centered on the combination of resources. Contemporary events force concern for forms of economic organization, inquiry into which must put the human role uppermost. A taxonomy of economic organization contains three systems of production and three of control. The Enlightenment brought freedom of contract as a control system, which fits well with proprietary production in farming but clashes with industrial nonfarm production. The nonfarm economy faces institutional reform, while farming must choose its production-control pattern. Examination of alternate production and control systems can aid in organizational choice.

Agricultural economics as a discipline has long found itself in the dilemma that to realize its highest potential of service in meeting real-world problems, to hold public support, and to be called a science, it must not only perform well technically but also demonstrate unblemished objectivity. The challenge to objectivity is more pervasive than is generally realized. It is greatest in the field of policy, where political and private interests are expressed. It takes on more importance now that action programs for agriculture are apparently a fixture and there is such a close organizational tie in agricultural economics—unlike general economics—between work on policy and management counseling. Although compromises, active or passive, are doubtless few, the preserving of objectivity is of crucial importance.

Malin labeled the 19th century 'a period of focus upon improvement of production. But after the middle of the century and toward its end, production began to outrun markets, "and the increasing stress upon distribution focused the farmer's attention particularly upon prices and price-making."2 Fifty years have now passed since a swing of the pendulum toward marketing brought the birth of a new federal agency charged with cultivating its improvement. The 50th anniversary of a service so significant deserves both commemoration and evaluation. This paper seeks to contribute the former by means of the latter. However, the evaluation will be more categorical than critical. In the 50-year marketing service history, three themes stand out: (1) Marketing services have several beneficiaries and must look to all of them for support. (2) Just as a brief display of exceptional interest in marketing led to the founding of the original Office of Markets, so has a pulsating pattern marked its subsequent history. Most major expansions of marketing services have come at a few times of reawakened faith in their efficacy. (3) Whereas roughly the first half of the 50-year period was devoted to making the marketing system more perfectly competitive, in the second half, measures were developed to offset some of the imperfections in the system. It would perhaps be appropriate if a fourth theme could be added in this Jubilee year-that federal services to marketing are on a new upsurge. Not so; the bonfire of the wheat referendum put marketing in the shadows. Nevertheless, a few straws in the 1963 winds point to incipient concern for marketing. It turns chiefly on the evidence that the marketing system is departing ever further from the perfectly competitive model. The policy decision looming ahead poses a dilemma: to what

Two quotations, opposite in sentiment and four centuries apart in their time reference, introduce the first of several pairings of ideas around which this paper will turn. The role of agriculture in institutional change has been inconsistent and even contradictory in the past and continues so to this day. Viewed historically, one conventional wisdom as capsuled by Jaffa has it that commerce and trade heroically rescued later medieval society from the suffocating grasp of agrarian feudalism. Thereupon industry and the city became the symbol of social, political and economic enlightenment. The doctrine persists to this day. Professor Paarlberg of Purdue, now Director of Economics for the Secretary of Agriculture, has dubbed it "urban fundamentalism". If urban culture is superior rural must be inferior. Rural people have felt the stigma. However, in the hands of rural politicians, whose parliamentary talents are not inferior, the notion of rural subordination became a useful tool. Exploiting economists' coinages such as "parity price", they won sympathy and subsidy from the cultured and affluent cities. Urbanites' proclivity to look down noses at the countryside has cost them to the tune of some 5 billion treasury dollars a year. To complete this first antithesis, urban fundamentalism has

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.

“The Great Society is the ‘age of the economist.’ One finds economists not only at the center of economic policy, in the Council of Economic Advisers, but also as important formulators of policy in the Departments of Defense, HEW, and HUD, and even as analysts of the status of the performing arts.” (USDA could have been added.)Despite the contemporary accuracy of these lines from a recent issue of The Public Interest, any inference that the Great Society was the first “age of the economist” is patently wrong. That label belongs to the New Deal era.

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.