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Show Former occupation By Dr. Doyle J. Matthews Dean of Agriculture and Director Utah Agricultural Experiment Station Utah State University Anyone who is trying to farm at a level which was a family unit in 1930 is now a "hobby" farmer. To live he must derive most of his income from other sources. Tremendous numbers of people compose this part-time part-time or hobby farmer group (nearly 50 percent of farm residents have non-farm non-farm employment), yet Protein Is Protein? The highly publicized "liquid protein" weight reducing diet, linked to a number of deaths recently, in no way resembles whole protein, like meat, says the National Live Stock and Meat Board. The so-called "liquid "liq-uid protein" is a "pre-digested" product. The initial material is whole, low quality protein collagen. coll-agen. It goes through enzymatic enzyma-tic digestion which results in an unbalanced mixture of amino acids at the time it's consumed. their contribution to the food basket of the nation is not very significant. The largest 17 percent of the nation's farms produce 80 percent of the farm sales. The smallest 61 percent of farms have only 5 percent of farm sales. People choose part-time or hobby farming primarily for its social values. We must recognize that before that kind of farming could become profitable again and supply the bulk of our nation's food, grocery costs would go out of sight, half the nation would be hungry and our standards of food quality would become a memory. Times have changed from the 1930's. For a farmer and his family today to support themselves them-selves from fulltime farming far-ming with the same level of sustenance would require 100 dairy cows or 450 range beef cows or 2,500 range sheep or 2,500 acres of dryland wheat or 200 broad sows or 50,000 hens or 640 irrigated acres to con stitute economic units. Agricultural research is shifting its emphasis in response to new situations. It will remain the single best device the family farmer can use to get a handle on his problems. Agricultural research will probably never neglect ideas for increasing efficiency. ef-ficiency. But new research demands are for better ways of keeping the farmer informed of the agricultural scene, especially the market. Most agricultural marketing is antiquated and works to the producers' disadvantage. New methods, possibly involving in-volving the cooperative approach, are needed. We should see a flurry of research in this area. At Utah State University we serve primarily the family farmer as the basic unit of agricultural production. Our research attention is focused mainly on enhancing the productivity of economic family farming units. |