Essays on the Political Economy of NJ Farming

Political Economy: the study of agricultural production, buying and selling, farmland use, and their relations with law, custom, and government regulation, as well as with the distribution of income and wealth.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and
you're a thousand miles from a cornfield.

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

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• Real Issues in the Decline of Mid-size Farms

• Market Failure Drives Sustainable Farm Policy and Legislation
  The rationale behind the need for farm legislation is a market failure in the crop sector – the lack of timely response on both the supply and demand side to changes in price, especially large and rapid changes in price.
  Market failure in and of itself is not even sufficient justification for governmental response. Thus, the second crucial factor is that agriculture produces an essential product for the nation’s well-being: food.
  The rationale generally became recognized and accepted in the wake of the Great Depression and the New Deal that followed. Farmers and farm groups lobbied for various policy changes over the decades that followed to the present time.
  
  -Adapted from Daryll E. Ray, University of Tennessee