provided by Research Papers in Economics
ISSUES AND PROBLEMS OF
IMMEDIATE CONCERN
J. Carroll Bottum
Professor of Agricultural Economics
Purdue University
To treat the assigned subject involves forecasting the future public
policy issues of concern to agricultural people. I shall try to forecast
some of them. No one can fully see the course of events in the future,
and I know that in the decade ahead new issues will arise which none
of us here today will foresee. Nevertheless, I am equally sure that
some of the issues I am discussing will be issues in the seventies. We
can prepare for these and take the others as they come.
Issues at both ends of the national and local spectrum have been
omitted from this statement. National issues, highly value oriented
and considered by the mass media, such as law and order, drugs, and
death on the highways, have been omitted. At the other end of the
spectrum a myriad number of local community issues, such as hos-
pital facilities, libraries, and recreation, have been omitted because
they are problems of concern to limited areas. This statement has
largely been confined to national and state issues in which economics
has a significant weighting in the total decision-making process.
Let us look first at the group of issues that will be of particular
concern to commercial agriculture and then at those that will be of
concern to rural people and all other members of society.
The total resources committed to agriculture continue to exceed
those necessary to meet our domestic and foreign needs in the decade
ahead. We all know that we have excess human resources in agri-
culture. We all know that during the past decade between 50 and 60
million acres of cropland out of a total of 450 million acres were re-
tired. The nonsense expressed by many in the early days of land re-
tirement that this reduction in acreage had little effect because land
comprised only 15 percent of the inputs in agriculture has been pretty
well dissipated. We know now that this land taken out of production
has an average productivity of 80 to 90 percent of that which is now
cultivated. Barry Flinchbaugh has just completed a study in central
Indiana which indicates the land taken out of farms in central Indiana,
according to its location on recent soil maps, has 90 percent of the
productive capacity of the land being farmed.
How this presently idled land shall be used will be a growing
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