The American Farmer and the Export Market

Authors:

Austin A. Dowell and Oscar B. Jesness

The American Farmer and the Export Market was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Shall we isolate ourselves behind the walls of national self-sufficiency and do without what we cannot produce? Or shall we try to break down trade barriers and restore export markets? How can we escape the intolerable combination of abundance and poverty?

“We have enough resources in the United States to provide for twice our present standard of living,” Secretary Wallace has asserted. This book is the most comprehensive analysis yet published of the problems that must be solved, the long-time plans that must be thought out, before America can abolish its “rural slums” and achieve the full benefit of its enormous resources.

Self-sufficiency and continued or increased exportation each has its price. Professors Dowell and Jesness show just what we may expect to gain or to lose from reducing production, shifting crops, abandoning sub-marginal land, boosting farm prices, and legislating trade barriers. They point out the relationship between agricultural and industrial recovery and between our policy in regard to world markets and the possibility of collecting our foreign debts.

The authors present facts, not theories – the pertinent facts on both sides of the most vital question that the American farmer faces today – After the AAA, what?

Austin A. Dowell was superintendent of the Northwest School of Agriculture at Crookston, Minnesota and head of the Extension School at the University of Minnesota. Dowell served as editor of Northwest Monthly.

Oscar B. Jesness was chief of the Division of Agricultural Economics at the University of Minnesota. He is co-author (with Reynolds I. Nowell) of A Program for Land Use in Northern Minnesota (1935), also published by the University of Minnesota Press.

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