ABSTRACT
Two major ex-ante impact assessments of Bovine Growth Hormone, one by Cornell University agricultural economists and another by the Office of Technology Assessment, have attempted to predict the effects of this new biotechnology on the dairy industry. Accordingly, social scientists working from the classical diffusion model view the less successful adoption of new technologies by smaller farmers, and ultimately their disappearance from agriculture, as being natural or inevitable. Many analysts of the Green Revolution began to criticize the social psychological assumptions that selected "modern" farmers and ignored "laggards". The controversies over the distribution of benefits from the Green Revolution have prompted a number of studies, the results of which argue against the assumptions of the classical diffusion model. Prosperous dairy operations will benefit most from the commercialization of bovine somatatropin and other biotechnologies because public and private institutions have cast them as the innovators and early adopters of new agricultural technologies.
