TEXT-Greenspan's farm economy speech (highlights) 3/16/1999
"Over time, farms thereby become fewer in number but are larger and, in most cases, more efficient, with strengthened ties to nonfarm businesses that supply inputs that are essential to improved technologies. The new technologies seem destined to integrate farming operations still more tightly into our complex modern economy."
"I cannot stress too much the overwhelming importance of technical change as a primary force that will likely be reshaping farm supply conditions--as it has been doing for a long time. As a consequence of each producer's striving to become more efficient and thereby to contain costs, successive waves of innovation have swept through the farm sector over the decades. Crop producers, in stages, have implemented increased mechanization, heavier uses of fertilizers, new higher-yielding varieties of seeds, low-tillage methods of production that have enabled producers to economize on energy inputs, and heavier reliance on chemicals and pesticides to reduce crop losses. The payoff to these efforts is evident in gains in national average yields per acre of roughly 40 percent to 60 percent for our major field crops--corn, wheat, soybeans, and cotton--over the past three decades."
"Moreover, some promising applications of new technologies are more farm specific. Combinations of electronic sensors, computers, and communications equipment are starting to give producers more control over farming operations that have always been vulnerable to pests or subject to the whims of nature. Applications of biotechnology have taken hold already in some parts of farming, and numerous new possibilities seem to be opening up."
(full text)
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