Booms, Busts, and Recoveries Message Board

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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries

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To: Joan Osland Graffius who wrote (22798)	8/18/2002 10:05:53 AM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (1) of 74559

I've done some study of the data on US agricultural productivity. The rise in productivity (total factor productivity) since 1948 has been pretty continuous. Fertiliser use only doubled from 1948 to 1993. What really increased dramatically was pesticide use. An almost 20-fold increase. Labor use fell to a quarter of its 1948 level. Own labor fell by more than hired labor. Total capital less than doubled. All this is from USDA productivity data. You might find different patterns in different parts of the US. I imagine that innovations would be first adopted in areas like California with intensive agriculture or Illinois and Iowa at the heart of the corn belt and maybe come later to the more peripheral regions like Minnesota (that's where you are from?). The maximum land in agriculture was probably around 1910. Since then urbanisation and forest regrowth has taken a lot of land out of production. In the mid-19th century 80% of the land in Massachusetts was in agriculture (crops and pasture). Today only 5% is. Like CB I've just studied the data which could in some respects be misleading and as I said local experiences will vary a lot. David

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