on Rural Poverty were heroic; we should not permit those efforts to
be wasted by not building on them. People do count, though for posi-
tive economic analysis they may have to be treated as simple factors
of production. People are the only factors of production that respond
to the set of incentives facing them.
Other publicly employed professionals serving agriculture, includ-
ing agricultural engineers, chemists, and biologists employed by the
USDA and the land-grant colleges, have made significant contribu-
tions to agriculture. But, the really large impacts that have led to our
present dualistic structure appear to be those of early land settlement
policies; later, but still in the days before the USDA and the land-
grant colleges really had anything to say about policy, industrializa-
tion which led to very rapid capital formation; and finally, our labor
policies of the early 1900’s which may have created significant bar-
riers to off-farm employment opportunities for farm people.
We do not want to leave the impression that we think structural
change has sharpened the distinction between two classes of Ameri-
can farmers. There were always two or more classes rather sharply
defined at the extremes. Nonetheless, a large number of farms in
existence now, perhaps as many as 2.5 million, are not likely to be
in existence thirty or so years from now. This number of farm firms
yet to exit from agriculture is not as large as the 3.6 million that
have exited over the past thirty years. Both farm people and rural
nonfarm people serving farm families have a relatively much larger
urban base into which to be merged than did the estimated 33 mil-
lion who left farms between 1920 and 1962. Hopefully, our research
and educational activities, and our policies, can be directed in such
a manner that the smaller number yet to leave can do so at less sac-
rifice and suffering than was true for many in the past.
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