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Publicly Funded Agricultural Research and the Changing Structure of U.S. Agriculture
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The U.S. food and agricultural sector is undergoing rapid change in production, distribution, and consumption of food and fiber, and in technology. There have been dramatic increases in production and marketing coordination, market contracting, concentration of agricultural output by fewer and fewer operations, and consolidation of agricultural operations. These increases are manifested in significant long- and short-term changes in farm size, number, distribution, and location. Production that once relied on small, independent, family-based farms increasingly occurs in large, consolidated, global operations. Small- and mid-sized operators often struggle to remain competitive and to adopt recent developments in technology and information. The changes occurring in the modern food and agricultural system pose major challenges for public-sector agricultural research and education. One challenge is the complexity of serving and meeting the needs of agricultural producers—both the large commercial agricultural production sector and the multitude of smaller producers, including low-income and limited-resource producers, and producers of niche commodities. There is concern that publicly funded agricultural research has influenced the development of technologies that have been or will be biased toward changes in farm size and industrialization of the farm sector. There is debate about whether publicly funded agricultural research is equally accessible to all users and whether it is targeted to the full range of user and citizens’ groups.
0-309-50992-0
NONE
Entrepreneurship
English
2002
1-158
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