Newspapers seem to be telling us that every cornfield is threatened by a Dairy Queen. This media barrage about the crisis of our “shrinking” farmland can be traced to the 1979 publication of Where Have All the Farmlands Gone? by the National Agricultural Lands Study. The NALS report, to which eleven federal agencies contributed, argued that land-use planning and control must be employed to protect valuable farmland from “urban sprawl.” This volume, a collection of essays by a distinguished group of economists including Theodore W. Schultz, Julian L. Simon, and Pierre Crosson, takes issue with the belief that croplands need governmental protection. In opposition the collection as a whole supports two theses: 1) shrinking farm acreage is not a serious problem, and 2) individual choices by landowners in a market setting result in better-organized land use than would governmental land-use planning and regulation. Published for the Political Economy Research Center, Bozeman, Montana

Most people in the United States believe that our environment is getting dirtier, we are running out of natural resources, and population growth is a burden and a threat. These beliefs according to Simon, are entirely wrong. Why do the media report so much false bad news about these? And why do we believe it? Those are the questions distinguished scholar, Julian Simon set out to answer in this book.

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of international migration on technical efficiency, resource allocation and income from agricultural production of family farming in Albania. The results suggest that migration is used by rural households as a pathway out of agriculture: migration is negatively associated with the allocation of both labor and non-labor inputs in agriculture, while no significant differences can be detected in terms of farm technical efficiency or agricultural income. Whether the rapid demographic changes in rural areas triggered by massive migration, possibly combined with propitious land and rural development policies, will ultimately produce the conditions for more viable, high-return agriculture attracting larger investments remains to be seen.