Two years ago, in his presidential address, Dr. C. E. Bishop told members of the American Agricultural Economics Association that “… our preoccupation with the problems of the farm firm has resulted in little or no attention to problems that are much more important to the majority of the rural population”.

Preoccupation with the farm firm is evident in our traditional approach to the study of incomes of farm people. There is still a tendency to look at the incomes of farm firms rather than at the incomes of people who farm. Present income statistics are oriented to the farm firm in a way that makes it fairly difficult to study the economic well-being of people involved in farming.