Excerpts from the Foreword: This report appraises the effect of technological changes on employment in agriculture since 1909. In making this appraisal it sums up 12 monographs published by the Work Projects Administration National Research Project and others still in preliminary form. These studies were conducted as one section of the research program of the WPA National Research Project on Reemployment Opportunities and Recent Changes in Industrial Techniques, directed by David Weintraub of

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... e WPA research staff. The present report contains considerable additional material and devotes more attention than the monographs to the consequences of these changes for the Nation and for the farm population. In conducting the agricultural studies, three lines of approach were followed, and the results are integrated in this volume. The first involved a study of the changes in total farm employment, farm population, size of the aggregate farm enterprise, and volume of agricultural production. Developments in agricultural technology formed the second section of the study. The third section of the work consisted in preparing estimates of the changes in labor requirements per unit of product and per acre of land or per head of livestock for leading farm enterprises.