Impact of the War on the Financial Structure of Agriculture

Excerpts from the report: War has a profound effect upon agriculture, just as it has on other basic industries. The stimulus of wartime demand for foods and fibers increases the flow of funds into and out of agriculture, thereby affecting the amount and distribution of farmers' assets and liabilities. Through price disturbances, war affects the financial structure of the farm business by changing the values of such assets as livestock and crop inventories and real estate, and particularly by altering the relation of assets to debts. So far during this war, agriculture has again felt mainly the stimulating influences of wartime buying of foods and fibers and of the huge expansion of credit incident to the financing of a great war—even though modified by certain brakes and restraints set up by the system of price control. On the whole, this is the period of stimulus and expansion which usually occurs while a war is in full blast. It seems timely, therefore, to draw up a list of assets and equities now, in order to see clearly what significant changes may have developed so far in the country's farm business as a whole as a result of the pressure of the second World War, and what the current tendencies may indicate for the future