ABSTRACT
The national trends toward the overall decline in farm labor use and the increasing relative importance of hired farm labor were cited at the beginning. The transfer of human resources out of agriculture and the decline in the use of labor on farms are among the most obvious and dominant changes in the history of US agriculture. Changes in the level of farm employment and the proportion of farm workers that are hired are the most commonly cited links between farm structure and farm labor use. The decline in labor use has been associated with the increasing capital intensity of agriculture, and the rapid adoption of new technology. Most of the secondary data on hired farm labor used in empirical analysis is taken from one or more of three major data bases. One of the major limitations of the Census data for labor analysis is the paucity of the labor data available.
