The Optimal Quantity of Land in Agriculture

Abstract

In 1952, when T. W. Schultz declared that land had lost its place as a unique factor of production, he was certainly right about U.S. agriculture. For the almost four decades since Schultz's prophetic analysis, output of U.S. agriculture has increased steadily while the exploited land base has slightly decreased. Land has not proved a constraint to production. Many varieties of technical change have kept the marginal product of land from falling, despite its increasingly intensive use.