FLORIDA FARM PRICES


 D. L. Brooke


 INTRODUCTION


 Information on prices received by farmers is very important to many
people, firms, and institutions. On a national basis price data are used
in computing cash receipts from farm marketing, gross and net farm income,
and agriculture's contribution to the gross national product. They are
valuable to economists, farmers, farm organizations, legislators, industry
management, and students for such purposes as projecting future price
trends, valuing production'and sales of agricultural commodities, and
administering federal programs. They are compiled regularly at the state
level by the Crop and Livestock Reporting Service and transmitted to the
United States Department of Agriculture for weighting, processing, and
conversion to a national series, which is published on a monthly and
annual basis. Too, a national index of prices received is constructed
and kept current by Washington.
 State data, on the other hand, are published only on a monthly basis
with annual averages at the end of each year or season. No great amount
of state price data for a long period of years is published by USDA, nor
do they construct index numbers on a state basis. That task is left to
the discretion of the individual states. Florida has published a long
series of price data in a single volume in 1944 in Florida Agricultural
Experiment Station Bulletin 399 and in 1972 in Florida Agricultural Exper-
iment Station Bulletin 753.









 D. L. BROOKE is professor of food and resource economics.