IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/uersab/309352.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The U.S. Farm Sector: How Is It Weathering the 1980's?

Author

Listed:
  • Harrington, David
  • Carlin, Thomas A.

Abstract

Commercial farms with gross annual sales of $40,000 or more (28 percent of all farms) generally had positive after-tax rates of return to equity in 1985. But noncommercial farms, those with gross annual sales of less than $40,000 (72 percent of all farms), showed small after-tax losses. The farm economy has deteriorated since 1981 when farmland values began to decline. By 1984, farming households earned only about 80 percent as much as the national average, compared with their historic high in 1973 when they earned almost 50 percent more than the national average. As many as 15 percent of all farm operators who were in business before 1980 may leave farming for financial reasons before the current economic adjustments end. Rural counties and communities whose economies rely on agriculture will have trouble maintaining many services as declining farmland values shrink tax revenues.

Suggested Citation

  • Harrington, David & Carlin, Thomas A., 1987. "The U.S. Farm Sector: How Is It Weathering the 1980's?," Agricultural Information Bulletins 309352, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:uersab:309352
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.309352
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/309352/files/aib506.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.309352?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. G. A. G. Frengley & W. E. Johnston, 1992. "Financial Stress And Consumption Expectations Among Farm Households: New Zealand'S Experience With Economic Liberalisation," Journal of Agricultural Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(1), pages 14-27, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:uersab:309352. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ersgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.