The Farm Poor: Counted, Miscounted, or Discounted?

Abstract

C HARLES DICKENS, in A Tale of Two Cities, opens with the state\Cy ment, was in the best of times, it was in the worst of times, ... it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair... . This perhaps echoes the sentiment of many people in the United States today. Our economy is in the best of times for many but in the worst of times for others. For some, their economic position puts them in a real spring of hope. For others, their future appears as a winter of despair. In order to more equitably share the wealth of our nation with its less affluent citizens, guidelines are needed to determine who the less affluent are, what constitutes poverty, and what some attributes of the are. Lack of financial resources is the handiest explanation of poverty. The current definition has been built around income: How much is necessary to maintain a family of four persons at a given level of living. This definition of poverty was developed for use by the Council of Economic Advisers in the President's war on poverty. Later the Social Security Administration (SSA) developed a poverty line centering around $3,000. In this definition, a family of four was considered poor if their total annual cash income was less than $3,000; a single unrelated individual, if his annual income was less than $1,500 [4]. The SSA refined this definition by including such variables as family composition, sex of head, and place of residence, (farm or nonfarm). The resulting poverty index is the officially adopted poverty definition of the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1955 the Household Food Consumption Survey indicated that families of four persons, regardless of income level or place of residence, spent about one-third of their annual income on food. It was thus assumed that an income of at least three times the cost of the economy food plan was necessary to keep a family out of poverty. Using the economy food plan, as developed by the USDA, and a multiplier of 3, as obtained from the 1955 survey, a poverty cutoff level was established. Thus, if the food plan was priced at $1,000, the resulting income would be $3,000. Any family of four with an income of less than $3,000, spending $1,000 or more for food would be considered to be in poverty. This same survey showed that about 40 percent of food consumed by farm families was produced at home. This means that the average farm