Special Studies of Marketing Costs and Practices

Excerpts from the report Preface: This is the third successive year of special research on price spreads (marketing margins) between farmer and consumer which Congress directed the Department of Agriculture to undertake. The special studies have been supplemented with supporting research on marketing costs and practices, as a means of analyzing and explaining the price margins and their relation to services performed. The House Subcommittee on Appropriations for Agriculture requested the Department to submit a progress report on the special price-spread studies and related research conducted under the appropriation for fiscal 1958. This publication contains mainly the material prepared for the subcommittee. The charts have been changed to show the most recent data available, but no changes have been made in the text or tables