stances surrounding each individual case. Variation between farms of the 

 region reflects a complex of factors including quality of land, management 

 skill, size and type of farm, financial resources, and many others. 



(b) An analysis centered around the operation of an individual farm 

 reveals the nature and extent of adjustments in other phases of the farm 

 organization that must go along with land improvements if full benefits are 

 to be realized. 



(c) The influence of a land treatment program upon costs of farm oper- 

 ation and on the resulting output and income can be estimated with a fair 

 degree of accuracy for an individual farm situation. This is because the 

 case approach permits more adequate consideration of such important fac- 

 tors as type and size of farm, quality of land, grade of management, degree 

 of interest in farming, and stage of development of the farm in question." 

 He feels that added insight which can be had by the unit approach as com- 

 pared to the area approach, or the so-called benefit-cost analysis.^ 



To have employed the budgeting technique, in the usual sense, to the 

 effects of flood control projects on the agriculture in reservoir areas, would 

 have required the existence of somewhat comparable units both before and 

 after construction. Since reservoir lands passed from private to public 

 ownership and management, this condition was not satisfied. Furthermore, 

 the difficulties of selecting "typical" units in a heterogeneous area would be 

 great. With respect to reservoir areas, paramount interest rested on aggregate 

 effects so other techniques offered greater promise in reaching this goal. 



S. C. S. Farm Plans 



Through the cooperation of district chairmen and individual farmers, farm 

 })lans were made available for study. These furnished much valuable infor- 

 mation on a number of units. However, almost all were downstream farms 

 rather than those using reservoir land. Furthermore, original and revised 

 plans usually did not closely span the time period involved, and reservoir 

 lands were not generally included. Had there been rather complete unit 

 plamiing in the areas of the type accomplished by the S.C.S.. and had the 

 time interval been approximated, much valuable basic data could have 

 been had without actual field surveys. 



Types of Farming Maps 



During the late 193()'s and early 1940's. the New Hampshire Agricultural 

 Experiment Station completed a map for each town in the state. These showed 

 i'fcation of roads, rural residences, numbers of cows, numbers of hens, 

 acres of fruit, vegetables, potatoes, and other data related to each unit's 

 output. Such data contributed to studies of types of farming. ^ 



Town maps of this nature, when checked against lists of names appearing 

 in property acquisition records of the Corps of Engineers and when com- 



1 The benefit-cost technique is described rather fully in : "Proposed Practices for 

 Economic Analysis of River Basin Projects," prepared by the Subcommittee on Bene- 

 fits and Costs. Report to the Federal Inter-Agency River Basin Committee, May, 1950. 



2 For example: Grinnell. H. C, "Type-of-Farming Areas in New Hampshire," N. H. 

 Agricultural Experiment Station Circular 53, February, 1937: and Middaugh, W. S., 

 and M. S. Parsons, "Type of Farming in the Northeast Region," Bureau of Agri- 

 cultural Economics, U.S.D.A., June, 1946. 



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