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the grocery shelves in accordance with the demand. The 

 food supply is a complicated problem that involves prices, 

 weather, available acreage, farm labor, changing population, 

 foreign trade, and numerous other factors. 



It is a tremendous task to provide an attractive, ample, 

 nutritious diet three times a day, 365 days of the year, for 

 136,000,000 people with different requirements, tastes, and 

 buying power. 



To produce the crops to feed our livestock and human be- 

 ings requires millions of acres of land, large amounts of man- 

 power, adequate machinery, a huge capital investment, and 

 an immeasurable store of knowledge. The economic system 

 must provide an adequate return so that the farmers will 

 have an incentive to plant, and a benevolent Providence 

 must provide rainfall and sunshine in the proper proportions 

 so that the crops will grow. 



Agricultural Production Always Near Maximum 



Agriculture is unlike industry in several ways. Agricultural 

 production, limited by the weather, is always near its maxi- 

 mum for a given price level, while industrial production is 

 usually limited by the amount that can be sold. A part of our 

 difficulty comes about because we apply to agriculture a type 

 of reasoning suited to industry. We think that if we increase 

 our demands for food, agricultural production will automati- 

 cally rise to meet them. A more realistic approach would be 

 to recognize that food production does the bidding of the 

 weatherman and prices and is allergic to administrative con- 

 trol. 



Half Our Land in Farms 



The United States has about two billion acres of land, of 

 which one billion are in farms (table 1). 



Although a little over fifty per cent of the total land area 



