SECTION 4
 Summary and Conclusions


 It has been shown that agriculture is an extremely important part of
Florida's economy, and that farmers produce a wide variety of enterprises
at no greater risk than farmers in other parts of the country. The majority
of the state's agricultural output comes from farms with large net farm
incomes marketing over $250,000 of annual sales, and that farm income and
off farm income has been increasing steadily over the past 19 years.
Most of their debt capital comes from the Farm Credit Administration.
Commercial banks play a proportionally much smaller role in financing
agriculture in Florida than banks in neighboring states or in the United
States as a whole. That does not necessarily mean that the aggregate6df
Florida farmers are short of capital. There is an intimation that are
agricultural lending opportunities for commercial banks that they are pre-
sently not utilizing.
 The survey results suggest that they probably will not take thes
opportunities in the near future. "Even though more than half the res on-
dents realized agriculture was at least fairly important in their are ,
only 6% of them employed agricultural specialists, and only 20% though t
that they would-need this specialization in the next five years.
 Agricultural lending requires unique skills, particularly in und r-
standing and interpreting the record keeping practices of farmers. T e
survey responses do not suggest that significant numbers of loan offi ers
with these skills will be added by commercial banks in the near future.
This conclusion is somewhat re-enforced by the percentage of total lo ns
allocated to agriculture by 265 individual banking units in Florida i
1977.18 A summary of the information is shown in Table 3.
 The 265 commercial banks were geographically scattered throughout the
state, and the proportion of agricultural loans was quite small for a ma-
jority. Seventy percent had either no loans or less than 1% of their loans
allocated to agriculture. Forty of the 77 banks in the latter catego y lent
more in farm mortgages than in operating loans. Only as the proportional


 18Melichar, Emanuel, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve S stem,
Washington, D.C. 20551, personal communication July 1978.