farming is the prospect of relatively low returns. Another one is the
relatively limited space over which management can be effectively
exercised. Electronic surveillance and other such developments may
expand the economic spatial unit of management in farming, but
still the capital required for an economic management unit seems
likely to remain considerably below that of many urban economic
activities. There may be sufficient families with the net worths re-
quired to finance economic management units in farming.
Let us return now for a moment to the question of political
astuteness of different types of managers. Price is the distributor of
rewards in either proprietary or corporate forms of ownership. Agri-
culture has excess capacity at present. Longer-run substitution elas-
ticities of demand apparently are high. Foreign competition for
domestic outlets is imminent for some products. Analog and syn-
thetic feasibilities of sizable proportions are now in prospect.
If only land is taken into account, geographic shifts in crop pro-
duction have been pervasive and unceasing. According to one esti-
mate, more than 50 million acres of cropland were involved in supply
adjustments within and among regions between 1949 and 1954. Ani-
mal products production has perhaps been even more geographically
mobile. It has been estimated that actions which prevent such shifts
may add as much as 10 to 25 percent to production costs. Society
may be unhappy to give massive bargaining power to managers of
any type in agriculture if this power is then used to add these costs
to its food and fiber bill rather than using it to achieve technological
progress.
The public’s vital interest in adequate food supplies at reason-
able prices certainly seems to us to imply continuing critical surveil-
lance by the public of the resource allocation and pricing processes
in agriculture whether they are conducted in the public or private
arenas.
Vertical, or Conglomerate, Corporate Control
Another structural trend argument cited by some against contin-
uation of government control of output decisions in agriculture is
that vertical integration is growing and that this trend eliminates the
necessity of profits from any one stage within the integrated firm for
advances in technology to be applied to that stage.
From our vantage point in marketing economics, we do not see
any reason for concluding that vertical integration is growing. Farm
families have relinquished many processing and marketing activities
to nonfarm firms over the past fifty years. This, of course, could be
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