New developments in marketing will affect differently producers, consumers, and marketing agencies. Seasonal supplies and prices of many fruits and vegetables will be more stable. Not many years ago the housewife was limited in her purchases of fresh fruits and vegetables to those grown within a radius of 10 to 50 miles of her residence. Now she can purchase lettuce every day of the year because lettuce is grown on the west coast the entire year. What has happened to lettuce has also happened to many other fruits and vegetables. As transportation and other marketing techniques improve, the story of lettuce will be repeated more and more often. Formerly, producers of strawberries received relatively low prices because the strawberries had to be sold quickly when they were ripe for immediate consumption or for preserving. Now, with facilities for freezing and good transportation, the producers are not forced to sell all their berries in the local market; rather, the berries that they cannot sell locally are sold in distant markets or are frozen to be sold in seasons when fresh berries are not available.

On the whole, local producers have more to lose than gain because of improved marketing methods. Agricultural commodities will be produced in areas of lowest costs, that is, where natural conditions of climate and soil make it cheapest to grow them. Formerly the consumer depended entirely on local production; now he can get his supplies from other areas if those supplies are cheaper or better. Thus the consumer gains from having a wider choice of good quality merchandise at widely competitive prices.

The gradual shifting of stores to a more completely self-service basis will favor the processors whose merchandise can win recognition among consumers and the trade. Retailers emphasize efficient service, sanitary methods, and the importance of preserving food values. Costs of giving the same marketing services will be reduced as a result of many of these developments, but the services may be increased to the extent that marketing costs as a whole may be much higher-that is, if the processors do part of the housewife's work, she will have to pay for it in higher costs.

Farmers will be variously affected, depending on their geographic location and competitive position. Greater emphasis will be put upon efficiency in production, and those growers so situated that they can produce high-quality products at relatively low cost per unit have everything to gain from improvements in marketing. The growers who stand to lose the most are the ones whose products sold because housewives had no other choice. Those producers will be forced to look to greater efficiency and higher quality in order to maintain their competitive position.

Marketing agencies will be affected most of all. Established enterprises that try to rest on laurels won under different conditions will be among the first to lose their business to enterprises that have had the imagination to adopt the new methods. Periods of rapid technological change offer opportunities for enterprises smart enough to take advantage of the changes.

No attempt has been made to discuss the established pattern of marketing cotton, grain, livestock and livestock products, poultry and eggs, and fruits and vegetables. Department research workers are concerned with increasing the producers' returns and giving the consumers an improved product at lower cost. This may be accomplished by improving the established marketing pattern as well as by establishing new ones.

THE AUTHOR R. W.. Hoecker, a principal agricultural economist in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, was reared on a Missouri livestock and grain farm and educated at Iowa State College and Cornell University. Before joining the Department, Dr. Hoecker was assistant loan agent and farm manager for a life insurance company and assistant professor of marketing in Kansas State College. He is in charge of the marketing and transportation research on fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and poultry.

Farm Science and Citizens

by SHERMAN E. JOHNSON SINCE CREATION, men have joined to conquer nature or separated to fight for her fruits. Science has furnished them increasingly effective tools to make nature more productive and increasingly effective weapons for seizing a larger share of the goods produced.

When men, as allies, use science to get the most from each acre, each worker, each machine, each animal, they make it possible for the earth or a part of it to support more people-and so to postpone indefinitely the day when the pressure of a population increasing faster than life-supporting resources would impel men to fight one another. For example, 140 million Americans now live in relative peacefulness in an area where a fraction of a million Indians once fought for hunting grounds.

Scientific progress enables some people to live better, and more people to live. But history affords evidence that technological improvements, which bring profits to the producers who can adopt them, and which benefit mankind in general, also bring misery and distress to the individuals who cannot adjust themselves to the new conditions. Such individuals are likely to resist and may be strong enough to delay technological progress: Lancashire spinners and weavers, ruined by the invention of power spindles and looms, for instance, tried to destroy them before they gave up to become workers in the English textile mills.

The farmer has an indirect interest in the effects upon the consumer of higher farm production from each acre and each hour of labor because the market outlet for his product affects his income. But he is interested directly in the effects of technology upon him as a producer.

These points raise two questions for us to consider: What effect has science had on farm production and the well-being of farm people? What effect is it likely to have?

Recurrent seasons of planting and harvest characterize technological progress in agriculture, as they characterize farming itself. The score of years between the wars was a time of tilling and planting. Progress was swift in the development of mechanical equipment, in discovering the use of lime, fertilizer, cover crops, and conservation, in improving plants, animals, and feeds, and in controlling insects and diseases. But low income and drought made it difficult for this new technology to bear fruit.

Luckily, good weather returned at the beginning of the Second World War, just when the needs of our Allies and then of our own armies combined with rising farm incomes to impel farmers toward the highest production we have ever had. Fed by the combination of knowledge, good weather, fairly adequate tools, and hard work, farm production shot up like weeds in midsummer; the war abundantly harvested the 20-year period of technological preparation and growth.

Machines

I mean to limit this discussion to improvements in farm technology, but as we seek out the reasons for the wartime increase in agricultural production we will have to remember that some improvements in marketing and industry outside agriculture may also significantly affect farmers and farm workers. Air transportation, for example, or quick-freezing and other improved processes may greatly enlarge the market for some farm products. Decentralization of industry into rural areas may provide nearby markets for products that are new to many farmers. On the unfavorable side, improvements that cause labor displacement, when substitute employment is not available, shrink the market outlet for farm products. In examining the record of improvements, we have to consider separately the developments in farm mechanization, the use of land, and the growing of crops and animals. When that is done, we shall trace the effects of these developments on the total volume of production, costs, prices, and returns for farm products, and, finally, on farmers and farm workers. We have to remember in all this that what affects farmers affects all of us.

The steel plow and other new tillage machines, the mower, the reaper, the thresher, and in time the self-binder, were the key machines in this development. The human labor used to produce 100 bushels of wheat dropped from 320 hours in 1830 to 108 hours in 1900;.by 1940 a new series of improvements had reduced the labor used to 47 hours.

The new machines made it easier to settle the fertile Midwest and later the far Western States. They helped provide the exports of farm goods that paid part of the interest and principal on the foreign debts incurred to build our railroads and factories.

The number of tractors rose steadily from 1910 to 1945, interrupted only by the drought and depression of the early 1930's. On the other hand, the number of horses and mules declined steadily, beginning in 1919. The introduction of the general-purpose tractor in the 1920's and the shift to rubber tires in the 1930's made tractors versatile enough to furnish power for most farm operations. With these improvements came almost equally significant changes in the equipment for use with tractors. Indeed, most of our tractor-powered machines today have been especially designed for use with tractors.

The improvements and higher farm incomes hastened the shift to mechanized farming. In 1945 there were 2,425,000 tractors on farms-an increase of 57 percent from 1940. In the same period, the number of grain combines increased 74 percent, corn pickers 53 percent, and milking machines 117 percent-despite wartime limitations on the manufacture of farm machinery-although the limitations on manufacturing new machinery during the war were relatively less restrictive on the labor-saving types of machines I have mentioned. If more new machinery had been available, mechanization would have been farther along at the end of the war, especially in the South.

If, as seems likely, food needs remain fairly high and farm income moderately high in the transition from war to peace, farmers will continue to buy a great deal of machinery for several years. They probably will own about 3,000,000 tractors by 1950.