Faced with changing economic conditions, farm operators have dramatically increased the rate at which they divide their work time between self-employing farm work and the wage labor market, a situation which best can be described as multiple labor market participation. By the time the Rural Income Maintenance Experiment began in 1969, over 54 percent of all operators in the United States had off-farm sources of income, primarily from wage work. (This and subsequent national statistics are derived from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Agriculture, 1969). This figure had grown almost 10 percentage points from the end of the previous decade. Furthermore, there are strong negative correlations between the sales levels of farms and both the rate of multiple market participation and the attachment to the wage market of those who participated in it.