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Abstract
Excerpts from the Introduction: The Federal-State Market News Service and other public and private agencies devote considerable resources to collection information on agricultural marketing and disseminating it through mass media and mimeographed daily and weekly reports. The purpose is to increase the general efficiency of this sector of the economy, encourage orderliness in the flow of goods from producer to consumer, and discourage unfair trade practices which otherwise may develop where marketing knowledge is meagre and poorly distributed. The present study was undertaken to examine in some detail the effectiveness of this service to potato growers in Southern California. Because the relationship of the structure of the business to the need for information was not very well known, attention was given to studying the organization of the industry, the economic channels by which the potatoes move, and who makes what decisions on marketing as well as identifying kinds of information received by growers, how they use it, and what they thought about its effectiveness.