American Agriculture: Its Capacity to Produce

Excerpts from the report Preface: Last year when the demand for U.S. agricultural products was rising sharply, a number of people began to question whether U.S. agriculture had the productive capacity to meet the higher demand level. In late summer 1973 Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz asked the Economic Research Service to evaluate American agriculture's productive capacity. Materials were pulled together from a variety of sources. Estimates were first made of cropland availability including land suitable for irrigation. Production was evaluated in terms of the level of output that could be obtained with no land held out of production, with adequate input supplies, and assuming U.S. farmers made production decisions based on favorable market prices. The main focus of the effort was on major field crops, specifically those presently utilizing the majority of the land resource. Production capacity for livestock emphasized the capacity for cow-calf operations based on available pasture and forage. The feeding of cattle, hogs, and poultry was assumed to depend on availability of feed concentrates, which depends in part on the level of exports. The emphasis of this report is on the capacity that could be attained by 1985. This time frame would allow short term restraints to be overcome and a full adjustment made to our long-run capacity to produce.