14 MISC. PUBLICATION 7 02, U. S. DEPT. .OF AGRICULTURE 



(d) To elate the analysis has been almost entirely in terms of effects 

 on individual farms. Equally significant are aggregate effects on 

 an area, a region, and the Nation as a whole. More grass and legumes 

 mean fewer acres of other crops formerly using the cropland. More 

 beef and milk may mean fewer hogs and less soybeans. What shifts 

 in cropping and livestock patterns are foreseeable? What rates of 

 progress are likely to be made in obtaining desirable adjustments? 

 What effect will changes in systems of farming have on price rela- 

 tionships ? 



These are questions that cannot be accurately measured with the 

 data now available, yet no adequate analysis can ignore them. In 

 intensive phases of this study aggregate effects are to be studied, at 

 least on the basis of representative farming areas. There it should 

 be possible to appraise the extent to which forage crops might be 

 expected to displace cash crops, to study interfarm movements of 

 feed and livestock, inshipments of concentrates, feeds and forages, 

 market outlets for more of the products of roughage-consuming live- 

 stock, and other factors that will have a cumulative effect as more 

 and more farmers give greater emphasis to forage. 



PROCEDURE AND METHOD 



As previously inclicateel, work eluring the first year of this project 

 has includeel survey and appraisal of past anel present research in the 

 fields of forage production and utilization to determine the more prom- 

 ising technical possibilities. The literature in these fields has been 

 studieel and many researchers at the land-grant colleges and in various 

 branches of the Federal Government have given valuable assistance. 

 Research results have been supplemented wherever possible with 

 farmer experience to determine what happens under actual farming 

 conditions when these adjustments are made. 



Out of this combination of research results and their application on 

 farms, economic appraisals have been made for a limited number of 

 farming systems of the probable results of more forage on farm organ- 

 ization, operation, and cash income. In appraising the income possi- 

 bilities of these farming systems it is necessary to use some level of 

 prices and costs. Current levels are most convenient to use but current 

 conditions are always subject to change. Prices received by farmers in 

 1947 were 278 percent of those for the base period 1910-14, whereas 

 prices they paid for living and production, including interest and 

 taxes, were 231 percent. Thus, 1947 was a year not only of high prices 

 but also of very favorable relationship between prices received and 

 paid by farmers. It is doubly necessary therefore that appraisals also 

 be made for levels of prices and costs that represent less favorable 

 conditions. 



Farming systems, to be stable, must be able to weather the lean 

 years as well as to take advantage of the more prosperous ones. Two 

 levels of prices and costs have been selected, therefore, as bases for the 

 economic appraisals that have been made. The nature of these is de- 

 scribed in the following paragraphs. 



In the report "Long-Range Agricultural Policy" prepared by the 

 Bureau of Agricultural Economics for the Committee on Agriculture 

 of the United States House of Representatives in March 1948 (33)1 

 careful study was made of situations that might exist during 1955-65 



