EXPLANATION This is the ninth in a series of annual reports that carry forward the comparative balance sheet of agriculture first prepared for 1940. Each balance sheet is as of January 1 of the year it is issued. The balance sheet views agriculture as though it were one large enterprise. It is an aggregate of individual series of farm assets and the claims to those assets. In effect, it is connparable toa consolidated balance sheet of all farms, but it is not restricted to the assets and debts

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... f farm operators. It includes, in addition, the farm assets owned, and the farm-mortgage debt owed, by nonoperators. The balance sheet, formulated by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics for each year from 1940 to 1944, was first issued in processed form in September 1944, in a publication entitled "The Impact of the War on the Financial Structure of Agriculture.•• In August 1945, a printed report of this study under the same title was issued as Miscellaneous Publication No. 567 of the United States Department of Agriculture. In that report the nature and significance of the financial structure of agriculture were analyzed, and the meaning, use, and limitations of the balance sheet and its individual items were considered. Many of the considerations in that publication are still pertinent. They may be referred to with profit by those who examine the balance sheet of agriculture for the first time. The reader will recall that in a country as vast and diversified as ours, financial changes are never entirely uniform, either for geographic areas or for individuals. Thus, even when the balance sheet accurately reflects the aggregate, it does not reveal the differences that are found in different States and regions and among individual farmers. The report for 1952 was issued as Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 90 of the United States Department of Agriculture, The Balance Sheet of Agriculture, 1952. Data relating to the inventories of livestock, crops, machinery, and household equipment were prepared under the direction of the following persons: L.ivestock--A. V. Nordquist; crops--C. E. Burkhead, J. J.Morgan, George D. Harrell; machinery--E. W. Grove, Margaret F. Cannon; household equipment --Barbara B. Reagan. Data relating to farm income and expenditures were compiled under the direction of E. W. Grove. Attention is called to the fact that all series shown in this year's balance sheet, except those for livestock and non-real-e^tate debt, have been revised. Most of the changes resulted from the 1950 census which modified the definition of a farm and established new benchmark data for estimates of farm real estate, livestock, machinery and motor vehicles, crops stored on farms, and farm-mortgage debt. It also affected the estimates of savings deposits and United States savings bonds owned by farmers, as it provided measures of the decline in farm population that had not been available when the earlier estimates for these series were made. Some of the changes resulting from the 1950 census were introduced in the balance sheet for 1952, but further revisions were made as additional census data becanne available and estimating procedures were improved. The series on household furnishings and equipment was affected both by the 1950 census and by changes made in the Department of Commerce series on retail sales of chain or mail-order furniture, housefurnishing, radio, and appliance stores.