« Small is beautiful ». Nouvelles idées concernant les dimensions des exploitations agricoles

The « new » ideas about the farm sizes and other structural problems in agriculture has developed gradually over the last decade as more and more negative consequences of the technological innovations and structural rationalization in the farming sector have become obvious. The technology, according to the new ideas, is taken as the main « adjustment variable », so that we shall be free to choose the sizes of farms, the number of farms and farmers, farm employment, and aggregate farm land politically as objectives for the agricultural policy together with the aggregate volume of production of each commodity. The idea of adjusted technology in farming is simply that we shall use so much technology on each farm as necessary to make it possible for each farm family to produce a certain amount of commodities on a certain amount of farm land, when the family's labour is fully employed.