Agricultural Outputs

Over the past 100 years and more, U.S. agricultural production grew rapidly and the composition and location of production changed markedly, too. Different measures of agricultural output give different perspectives on these changes. This chapter provides a detailed assessment of the temporal and spatial patterns in the quantity and value of U.S. agricultural production and its composition. The chapter concludes with a presentation of Fisher indexes of output quantities. These indexes are used with the corresponding indexes of input quantities from Chapter 3 to compute the productivity indexes for 1949–2002 that are presented in Chapter 5 and used in the econometric models in subsequent chapters.