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A Note on Shifts in Parity, Poverty, and Sources of Farm Family Income in North America

By world standards, the agricultural: nonagricultural transition in North America is relatively complete. Like early manufacturing with its small shops, farms that have failed to adopt labor economizing and cost-reducing technology are being squeezed out, bought up, or amalgamated. Today's farm sector is increasingly characterized by progressive farmers who operate larger, more well-to-do farms, are managerially more adept at adopting cost-reducing technology, are more financially able to risk recent innovations, and have greater access to required credit for purchase and implementation. Of course, economic growth and technology continue to condition North American input and output objectives at a pace that eludes the capacity of many farmers to adjust. By reducing the nonfarm capital to labor price ratio, economic growth compels farmers to adjust to the new price ratios by using new forms of capital and less labor. By tipping the output demand balance, technological advances often result in disequilibrium in the form of low-parity (price) ratios and lower returns to farm resources in general. Thus, in one form or another, the familiar cost-price squeeze tends to remove those on the margin, with the result that disequilibriums in the parity of returns to agricultural and nonagricultural labor and capital progressively narrow. The purpose of this note is to chart progress in this transition process over the last few decades in terms of (a) narrowing of the farm: nonfarm income gap, (b) reduction in "poverty" levels and income inequality, and (c) shifts in sources of income that herald an important