Agricultural Policy: An Economic Perspective
May 20, 1985

Defining the "Farm Problem"

    U. S. agricultural policy originated with the depression of the 1930s, a period when low consumer ability to buy caused extremely low farm product prices and an extremely high rate of farm bankruptcies. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 tried to remedy the situation by establishing a price support system for farm products: if the farmer could not get enough for his crops to cover the costs he had encumbered himself with in growing those crops, he could instead request payment from the government, and in return, turn over his harvest to the government. The theory was that the government would hold these surpluses in storage until there was a shortage, and then resell them to reimburse itself. But shortages have been rare, so the American government has consistently had a large surplus of certain products in storage. This chronic overproduction has been an ongoing problem.

    Why have surpluses characterized farming? Agriculture is traditionally used in the discipline of Economics to typify the commercial organization closest to the classic model of Pure Competition. This has been because agriculture typically has been accomplished by a very large number of individual farmers (or farm families), the cost to enter the field has been minimal, the products produced have been quite standardized, and the producers have had almost no ability to influence the price of their products.

    However, there is an underlying contradiction to pure competition in modern agriculture. Classic pure competition is based on the premise that when prices rise, the producers will produce more of their product, in order to take advantage of the price rise. Similarly, when prices fall, producers will cut back their production, and thus avoid losses. However, the current situation of American farming is that, whether prices rise or fall, farmers cannot cut back their production. This is so because many of today's farmers have much higher fixed costs, including irrigation system, fertilizer, and farming equipment, and the interest on the loans used to purchase all of these. In the Pure Competition system of business organization, producers are "price-takers", meaning that they can take the price offered them, or leave it . . . and cut their production back. Now, however, farmers must keep production high no matter what price is offered them, because their production costs have such a small component of variable costs that they must use all their productive resources just to avoid losses.

    In the light of this underlying contradiction in the American system of agriculture as pure competition, let us now look at changes in American agricultural policy proposed by the administration of President Reagan (as announced by Budget Director David A. Stockman and Department of Agriculture Secretary John R. Block). In 1985 the administration proposed to revise American agricultural policy to attempt to return the farms more nearly to an unmodified system of pure competition. [1] Economic analysis has shown that price controls will usually generate surpluses. However, administration thinking was that ongoing surpluses are due only to the price control activity of previous years. Thus, the hope was that elimination of much of this price control activity would result in lowered production.

    But, given the extent of expensive technology in use in agriculture today, and its accompanying inherent requirement to keep production high, a return to pure competition can lower surpluses in only one way: by eliminating farmers.

    This report will therefore examine proposals for agricultural policy reform from three bases:

    (1) What would such a proposal do to the business of agriculture and to U. S. society in general?

    (2) What would such a proposal NOT do that might actually put American agriculture in a healthier, more sustainable state?

    (3) What other possible proposals exist that might go farther toward reaching the social and economic goals which we would like to see?

Proposals for Agricultural Policy Reform: What They Will Do

    According to the administration's analysis, deregulating agriculture would stimulate and reinvigorate the industry. Advocates argue that a return to pure competition would "weed out" inefficient farmers. However, recent research shows that is it not the most inefficient farmers that would be eliminated, but the most vulnerable; those with fewer assets and less volume, and therefore a tighter cash flow and a lesser degree of borrowing opportunities. Most of the farm debt is in fact owed by the 27% of farms which are middle-sized ($40,000 to $5000,000 a year in sales) - in particular by those middle-sized farmers who borrowed heavily to buy more land and equipment during the export boom of 1972-1982. [2] Agricultural economist Tom Miller, who authored the U. S. Department of Agriculture study "Economies of Size in U. S. Field Crop Farming", has pointed out that the most efficient farm size for efficiencies of scale has already been reached by these farms. [3] Increasing the size of U. S. farms will not better their efficiency at food production, but only their ability to control or cope with the market.

    Thus, the result of trying to encourage pure competition in agriculture with these proposals may well lead to a lessening of competition, or oligopoly. In 1975 another USDA study predicted that without controls, one and a half million farms would go out of business by 1985, and of the remaining farmers, only 9% would own all of their land. [4] That is, there would be fewer farm-owners. And, in fact, by 1981, farms over 1000 acres accounted for 54% of the nation's total farmland, and half of all agricultural sales. [5] But, it is not necessarily the work-force of farming that is changing, just the ownership; for in the same period (1972-1982) hired labor went from 25% to 50% of all farm labor. [6] A March 3, 1985 article on European and Latin American investors who are currently "snapping up" inexpensive U. S. farmland, noted that "in nine out of ten cases, [the investors] made various financial arrangements with the previous owners to work it for them". [7] Furthermore, while the number of U. S. farms decreased from 6.4 million in 1910 to 2.44 million in 1982, the amount of agricultural acreage increased from 879 million acres to 1,046 billion acres. [8] The tendency toward a farming industry with unequal distribution of income, characterized by large landholders and tenant farmers, has been very strong in recent years anyway (as has often been noted of purely competitive systems), and a return to purer competition can only increase that tendency. In which case, surpluses will be reduced very little, since the same number of acres will still be in production, albeit with fewer entrepreneurs controlling them.

    What effect will this change in the number of farms have on the rest of U. S. society? For one thing, large scale agribusiness, though usually insulated by its borrowing power, can be much more risky. If one big farm does go broke, there can be huge ripples of effect on all its creditors. Besides, large farms are also more capital-intensive and energy-exhaustive; they may have short-term economic advantages, but in the long term they are more susceptible to energy shortages and economic difficulties.

    Furthermore, former farmer-owners, as mere tenant-farmers, will be getting less of a share of the profit from farming, and will thus have less discretionary income to spend; also, some of them will be unable to find work. As the Circular Flow Model of Economics shows, this will lessen the amount of money in circulation, and slow down the economy. Both of these effects can hasten depression. Some former-farmers will move to cities looking for work, where they put a greater burden on locally-financed social services, or increase the pool of available industrial/service workers, further depressing wages. Their departure will contribute to the decline of rural communities (a small family-farm economy has been shown to support 20% more people than a large-scale agribusiness economy, with a 12% higher standard of living [9]), further depressing the economy. Former-farmers will have to buy more of their needs, thus increasing the tendency toward less resilience in the economy, more cries for employment, less independence from government. And finally, a reduction in farm-ownership will mean not only an eventual rise in food prices, as growing oligopoly invites collusion in price-setting, but also less choice for all of us about how we earning a living. As one writer noted, "it seems unlikely that an agricultural system that employs 20% of the nation's work force and generates an estimated 25% of the GNP can be transformed into an industry by a relatively few large farms without profoundly altering the nation's political fabric". [10]


Proposals for Agricultural Policy Reform: What They Will Not Do

    While trying to push the organization of our agriculture closer to pure competition, proposals for reform do nothing about the basic contradictions underlying our farming system which really cause the farm surplus problem. In order to understand the dynamics of this ongoing problem, we need to look not only at agriculture as a system of pure competition currently regulated by price controls, but also at the interface of that system with both its resources and its markets. If this were done, it would be clear that some basic hazards threaten any farming system just from the oligopolies with which it must deal.

    U. S. farmers must buy from oligopolies. Four firms control 83% of all farm equipment sold in the U. S. A 1972 Federal Trade Commission study calculated that farmers are overcharged $250 million annually by equipment-makers. [11] Furthermore, unlike the purely competitive farmers, equipment producers can hike prices during booms, yet hold them tight during downturns by cutting production levels. For example, during the depression of the 1930s, farm equipment production was cut back by 80%, resulting in a wholesale price decrease of only 15%. Meanwhile, farmers were able to cut their production by only 6%; so the prices they received for farm products dropped 63%. [12] And farm equipment is only one of the areas where farmers have to buy from oligopolies: another example is the oligopolies due to railroad mergers since the 1980 deregulation of railroads, which has led to the closing of many branch railroad lines much needed by farmers.

    U. S. farmers must sell to oligopolies. By `1978, fifty top food processors controlled 63.7% of the industry. [13] This means that price increases often don't go to the farmers, but are absorbed by "middlemen". For example, 1973 was the year of the highest "farm income" of the 20th century. Food prices shot up 48% between early 1972 and mid-1975. But while the farmers' portion of that increase only went up by 8%, the portion that went to non-farm labor, packaging, transportation, corporate profits, advertising, etc. rose three times higher. The after-tax profits of food corporations rose by 54% between 1973 and 1975, more than that of any other component of the U. S, food bill. Yet decreases in prices do go to the farmers. When farm product (commodity) prices fall, food prices do not. For example, food prices still pushed upward even after commodity prices began to fall in 1975. [14]

    These realities are nothing new. They are inherent in any production system organized on the basis of pure competition which has to deal with any other production system organized on the basis of oligopoly. They were true when President Roosevelt instituted his Agricultural Adjustment Act in the 1930s, and they were true when President Nixon's administration promoted the export of food products in the 1970s. And neither of these schemes changed the basic rules of the game that farmers have to play.

    Does this mean that pure competition is an unworkable system in the modern world of oligopolies? The Reagan administration seemed to be arguing this when they advocated "efficiencies of scale" (translation: agribusiness-run farms). But we have already noted what consequences the encouragement of yet another oligopolistic system of organization might have. Yet, it certainly is true that the market economy has no mechanism that allows its participants to act for their mutual interest . . . or to make non-price economic decisions on a democratic basis. For example, there is not way the dollar vote can be used to promote decentralized land ownership; or worker-ownership; or stable rural communities; or wise conservation of soil and water resources (which would be heavily taxed by large, technology-intensive farms); or reinvestment in U. S. industry rather than the use of profits for mergers or investment abroad. These can only be done through our political system. So it seems that we need to encourage systems based on pure competition which are tempered by community-based decision-making. This not only holds true for farming; it would also better the way our other food-related industries work (farm equipment manufacturing, food processing).

    Such suggestions usually raise the hackles of advocates of pure capitalism because it is believed that the only way to institute such systems would be through the enlargement of the governmental bureaucracy. However, the next section of this report will show that there are many ways to modify our pure-competition system of agriculture without more deeply entrenching government in our affairs (and deepening our national debt). Plus, if American farms were healthier, and forms the basis of economic welfare for a good part of our population, government involvement could be reduced in many areas it is now needed. People would be able to provide for many more of their own needs, instead of always having to purchase them, and small-scale farming would keep many more people from the welfare rolls. And if it proved less "efficient", who would that harm? All that would mean is that the farm surplus problem would be solved.


What Can Be Done

    Before making any suggestions for other ways to approach the farm problem, there is one very popular panacea that needs to be considered - the idea that since surplus is a given, the solution is to increase its export. This idea does work effectively from time to time, when other countries' economies are in a downturn, as happened right after both World Wars. But it is not a policy that can be relied on otherwise. In fact, the size of the market for U. S. agricultural products is questionable. Europe is comparatively healthy and its European Community is watching our for Europe's market interests. Previously under-developed nations are exporting more, or at least not importing, basic food commodities to a lesser degree. China, which was once dreamed to be a vast food market, is now, since its free-market reforms, producing much more of its own food. That leaves the U. S. S. R., but it can not be counted on to buy only from the U. S.

    A major reason that the farming industry was in distress in 1985 was that many farmers geared up for export markets as if they were a certainty (with direct encouragement of the Department of Agriculture), and were left "holding the bag" when exports were reduced in 1983. This great move to production for export which was not fulfilled was also the cause of a good part of the monumental surplus with which the U. S. government had to deal from 1982 to 1985.

    Therefore, long-term health of the farming industry should not be made dependent on the vagaries of the export market. Although farm exports are favored as a way to balance the U. S.'s unfavorable balance of trade, that solution has as its basis a political agenda. On the contrary, it would be better to take the burden of production for export off our farmers, by reducing oil imports and re-balancing in that way.

    However, our purpose is not necessarily to find means to expand agriculture, but rather promote agriculture as a steady-state, stable means for a good-sized segment of our population to make a living and provide for our basic domestic needs. One important question is whether we have really had a workable system of price supports and subsidies. As a matter of fact, we haven't, and reforms are in order. As a report released by the Department of Agriculture in the closing days of the Carter administration pointed out, our current farm policies have steered the greatest benefits to the biggest producers. Due to open-ended entitlement, price support dollars go mainly to some 500,000 of our biggest farmers; again, the ones that could survive without the help. [15]

    In fact, the U. S. has never had an agricultural policy that gave firm priority to keeping a great number of its citizens employed in agriculture. One possible modification which could make our current system much more workable is embodied in the Farm Policy Reform Act of 1985, which was being readied for presentation to Congress as an alternative to President Reagan's proposals, by farm groups and leaders working in conjunction with Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower and Minnesota Agriculture Commissioner Jim Nichols, as well as other members of Congress including Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. [16] This act would target benefits to family farmers by requiring a higher percentage of land be taken out of production by larger farms. Not only would smaller farms thus get their proper proportion of benefits from government controls, but if cover crops were required on the unplanted acres, soil conservation would be enhanced, a spill-over benefit for all. [ It should be noted that the Stockman-Block proposals of 1985 did have two provisions which would also help to end government favoritism to large farmers - an annual limit of $20,000 per farm on subsidy payments and a limit of $200,000 per farm on price support loans - but the effect of those provisions would be greatly overshadowed by the other provisions included.)

    It has also been some time since farmers enjoyed real parity with workers in other industries. [17] It would be an interesting experiment to see what might happen with a really well-worked-out price support/regulated supply system. If farmers were actually guaranteed a price for their products that really covered their costs of production, they might be induced to lower their production. Tax breaks could also encourage change-over to slow-to-market and/or capital intensive crops (nuts, strawberries, lumber trees). A further suggestion included in the Farm Policy Reform Act will be the establishment of a farm insurance program to act as a disaster reserve, taking the place of current disaster loans and payments.

    Another much-needed reform would be a shirt in emphasis in government-sponsored agricultural research from the needs of big farms to the needs of smaller farms. After all, if mechanization and large-scale farming is so efficient, why do we need to subsidize themw ith public money? This problem was the subject of a suit brought by the California Agrarian Action Project against the University of California Agriculture Divsion. [18]

    But even more basic changes than these need to be made. To begin with, Congress could take some actions that would create an equilibrium between the farmers and the oligopolies with which they must do business. Short of trust-busting, one very workable idea could be revived from wherever it has been buried since it was last suggested in 1933. At that time, a very important provision of the farm legislation would have placed a tax on food processors to underwrite farm programs. This measure would return to farmers a portion of the financial loss they experience as the food processing oligopoly profits from lowered farm product prices. This could be the start of an equilibrium between the agricultural sector of our economy, which is basically competitive, and the industrial, which has always had a strong tendency toward oligopoly, and which can benefit greatly from the roller-coaster of booms and busts which are so damaging to farmers. In 1933 the U. S. Supreme Court found this section of the agricultural legislation unconstitutional, saying that it unduly penalized one branch of industry for what it defined as a broad "social problem". [19] In light of what has been learned about the workings of our economy since the time when that decision was made, it might be well to reconsider such a policy as one part of the answer to the problem of economic inequality. Then farmers for the first time might actually get the economic rewards they earn.

    Another way to deal with these inequalities between industrial sectors would be to encourage the creation of a modified oligopoly within the farm industry . . . an oligopolistic system modified so that it was designed to serve social needs rather than to fight them. Such an organization would be created by the formation of a system of grassroots farmer's cooperatives. Through cooperatives, farmers themselves could set their product prices, negotiate with commodities investors and food processing industries, and have the economies of scale which could allow them to keep data banks of information and communication equipment to be aware of the latest commodities pricing. Such cooperatives would enable a large population of farmers to represent themselves to those oligopolies with which they do business much as labor unions permit large numbers of workers to exercise such countervailing power. This antidote to the oligopolistic power of the food processing and farm equipment industries has never been fully explored. However, if pure competition is really so unworkable in the farming industry that Reagan's administration was willing to replace it with oligopoly, it might be well to instead encourage this formation of cooperatives, which, though oligopolistic, serve the many instead of the few. In addition, cooperatives offer the benefits of bottom-up instead of top-down decision-making, so highly touted as responsible for much of the success of Japan's industries.

    Probably two of the most important things such farmer cooperatives or associations could do would be to 1) set product prices at a level that covers production costs; and 2) regulate the abundance and scarcity of farm products by licensing or otherwise monitoring crop production. Such suggestions have never been implemented because they sound frightening. But let us examine them carefully.

    Farm product prices are said to be inelastic because consumers can't eat much more than they already do. Although a logical assessment of food production as a whole, this is not an accurate description of the demand for some important farm products. In fact, over half of the wheat, corn, and soybeans (the most common surplus items) which are raised in the U. S. to feed cattle; and it takes many acres of these feeds to produce one pound of beef. Thus, keeping grain prices low has allowed an increase in the production of meat. In this way, our society has turned an inelastic necessity (basic grains) into an elastic luxury (meat). A change in farm product pricing would make the price of meat reflect this cost of its production. Household use of grains and soybeans would hardly be affected.

    Another way to keep the market for farm goods high would be to grow other "luxury" foods which command a high price. People may only be able to eat a limited amount of food, but with higher incomes they alter the particular foods they eat to what they consider "high quality" items. Currently, many of these items are raised outside the U. S. Kiwis are imported from New Zealand, kumquats and cherimoyas from Mexico, chanterelle mushrooms from Europe, grapes from Chile. We also tend to import foods that take a great deal of "start-up" time before they are ready for market, such as avocados and nuts. Perhaps none of these crops could be grown here. The encouragement of such diversity in our agricultural production might be one possible outcome of farm cooperatives evaluating and assessing their production practices.

    Indeed, some very successful experiments are being tried along these lines already. South Carolina rice farmers are currently learning how to fish-farm crawfish. [20] Iowa farmers are switching from corn to trees. [21] Horticulturist Booker T. Whatley, backed by a Rockefeller grant, is teaching former soybean and cotton growers in Alabama, Georgia, and other parts of the south, to diversify into peas, quail, bees, and berries. [22]

    [Booker T. Whatley passed away in Montgomery, Alabama, at 89, on September 24, 2005, the day I typed this into the computer! I found the notice on the web at 7 am Saturday, which was 9 am in Montgomery.]

    Just as in any well-run business, it would make sense for farmers to study their market and adapt to the consumers' demands. In the past, farmers have been too burdened with mounting debt to be able to convert to an even-more-capital-intensive crop, let alone convince their financing institution to underwrite a new, and therefore more risky, product. As competitors always as the edge of bankruptcy, many have not been able to allocate the time and capital (much less the research and development costs) to make the necessary changes. (For comparison, wheat returns only $50 to $200 an acre, but also only requires an expenditure of $40 to $1000 an acre to start; tomatoes return $500 to $1200 an acre, but require $350 to $600 an acre to start; strawberries return the incredible amount of $2000 to $7400 an acre, but require $1350 to $2850 an acre to start.) [23]

    The farming industry could greatly benefit from more intelligent resource management. For example, growing trees for lumber will soon be a crying national need, as the great hardwood resources of the northwest become more and more depleted. Yet, few farmers could afford to plant their land (even parts of it) to lumber trees and then wait the requisite number of years until the trees can be harvested. Some lands are of course going to be less suited to such production, but a program of tax breaks or other incentives might be instituted for each farmer on suitable lands to switch at least some of his lands to hardwood production.

    Finally, once farmers got out from behind the "eight-ball" of indebtedness, they might be able to take advantage of the elasticity of luxury items by shifting to growing crops organically. Organically-grown crops bring higher prices, and the more crops that are grown this way the more affordable they will be. And, at the same time, farmer's costs would be lowered due to less use of pesticides, hormones, and chemical fertilizers.

    Farmer's associations and cooperatives could in these ways equilibrate the farming industry with the other industries in the chain of food production, and also position agricultural products in their proper market place. Land resources would be allocated for items more strongly demanded by consumers than basic grains, and farmers who did grow these basic grains would receive their true market value. The U. S. would no longer have to compete in dumping surpluses onto the international markets with other industrialized nations also looking to unload their surpluses. Protective tariffs would become unnecessary, as would attempts to work with European Common Market to reduce protection of their agriculture. Furthermore, farmers would once again have real "economic freedom"; that is, they would not be bound to the "catch 22" of debt and repayment, but would have real decision-making power about what and how much they will grow.

    Advocating cooperatives, of course, always brings on the question of whether independent farmers would participate. It must be noted that the 1890s saw a million farmers enrolled as members of the National Farmers Alliance. [24] This was despite official U. S. policy tending to discourage such membership. The U. S. has never had policies encouraging grassroots decision-making bodies in agriculture. Even though the U. S. is touted as the purest existing form of a capitalistic economy, we have tended to encourage the big capitalists, not the little ones. This emphasis can be seen in other industries as well; for example, governmental policies regarding lumbering and hydroelectric dam construction have decimated the fish resource, and resulted in a decreasing number of fishermen and a move toward enormous, capital-intensive "company" ships owned by the few, necessary to get out far enough into the ocean to find the remaining fish. [25]

    It might be added that the U. S. has also never had policies really favorable to promoting rural-living, despite the fact that emigration to the cities is increasingly being seen as a world-wide source of problems.

    Whether or not the U. S. government does develop policies favorable to grassroots decision-making in agriculture may, in the final analysis, not really matter. A look at what is happening in other industries around the country may indicate that there may be a tendency to some such type of organization in the not-too-distant future, regardless. For example, government deregulation of the airlines resulted in some companies instigating worker-share-ownership plans as mitigation for salary reductions. Steel industry worker-buy-outs, though still experimental as a remedy for steel industry de-capitalization, have resulted from government indifference to disinvestment. Time will tell whether a government course set on encouraging the growth of large farms may not also encourage small farmer cooperatives as a lifesaving measure instituted by the frustrated farmers themselves.

Conclusion

    In conclusion, the legislation which would be better to consider would have measure to 1) reform government regulation of agriculture to encourage small farmers; 2) equalize the agricultural and industrial sectors; and 3) encourage growth of farmer cooperatives and associations. This is the only way to allow farming to be a system of pure competition in an economy increasingly dominated by oligopolies.

    With industrialization and computerization of the "developed" economies of the world, surpluses are here to stay, and will be the general rule. The way to reap the benefit of this is to make ownership of the means of production more common. The economic theories of the future most needed will be ones able to suggest how to equitably distribute abundance, not just scarcity.


Footnotes

    1. King, Seth S., "Block Wins on Farm Subsidies Plan", New York Times, January 5, 1985; King, Seth S., "Reagan's Farm Bill Seeks Market Basis for Aid, Block Says", New York Times, January 23, 1985.

    2. Robbins, William, "Despair Wrenches Farners' Lives As Debts Mount and Land is Lost", New York Times, February 10, 1985.

    3. Lappe, Frances M., "Keeping Them Down on the Farm", New York Times, March 11, 1985.

    4. Wessel, James, "Trading The Future", San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1983.

    5. Kline, David, "The Embattled Family Farm", San Francisco Chronicle This World Magazine, December 13, 1981.

    6. Wessel, op. cit.

    7. "Foreign Farms - Here", New York Times, March 3, 1985.

    8. King, Seth S., "The Relief May Be Brief for Small Farms", New York Times, May 1, 1983.

    9. Kline, op. cit.

    10. Kline, op. cit.

    11. Kline, op. cit.

    12. Wessel, op. cit.

    13. Schildgren, Bob, "Report Warns of Food Monopoly Growth", Co-Op News, Berkeley: Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley, Inc., April 28, 1980.

    14. Wessel, op. cit.

    15. Kline, op. cit.; Schnittker, John A., "A Quick Fix for Grain Surpluses", New York Times, December 4, 1983; Schnittker, John Al, "A Call to Slash Price Supports, Soon", New York Times, December 30, 1984; King, Seth S., "Middle-Size Farms Endangered, Study Says", New York Times, March 20, 1985.

    16. Moberg, David, "Farmers Fight Back to Save Their Land", In These Times, March 27 - April 2, 1985.

    17. McConnell, Campbell R., Economics, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984, page 629.

    18. Rauber, Paul, "UC and the Tomato Hegemony: Funding the Mechanized Farm", East Bay Express, March 23, 1984.

    19. Wessel, op. cit.

    20. "South Carolinians Pin Hopes On a Big Harvest of Crawfish", New York Times, October 16, 1983.

    21. "Follow-Up on the News: Farm Struggle", New York Times, July 1, 1985.

    22. Seeber, Barbara H. "The Producer", Science 84, Vol. 5 No. 6, July/August 1984.

    23. French, Forest, "Management for Maine Small and Part-time Farmers", University of Maine, 1977, quoted in Tonseth, Peggy, "Buying Country Land", Garden Way Bulletin A-67, Charlotte, Vermont: Garden Way Publishing, 1981.

    24. Wessel, op. cit.

    25. Goldsmith, Judith, "The One That Got Away", East Bay Express, Vol. 7, No. 17, February 8, 1985.


Bibliography

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    Breimyer, Harold F., "The Biggest Enemy is Mounting Debt", New York Times, December 30, 1984.

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    King, Seth S., "Reagan's Farm Bill Seeks Market Basis For Aid, Block Says", New York Times, January 23, 1985.

    King, Seth S., "The Relief May Be Brief for Small Farms", New York Times, May 1, 1985.

    Lappe, Frances M., "Keeping Them Down on the Farm", New York Times, March 11, 1985.

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    Robbins, William, "Despair Wrenches Farmers' Lives As Debts Mount and Land Is Lost", New York Times, February 10, 1985.

    Schnittker, John A., "A Call to Slash Price Supports, Soon", New York Times, December 30, 1984.

    Schnittker, John A., "A Quick Fix for Grain Surpluses", New York Times, December 4, 1983.

    Seeber, Barbara H., "The Producer", Science 84, Vol. 5 No. 6, July/Augusst 1984.

    "South Carolinians Pin Hopes On a Big Harvest of Crawfish", New York Times, October 16, 1983.

    Wessel, James, Trading The Future, San Francisco: Institute For Food and Development Policy, 1983.