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The agricultural industry is the oldest basic, or export industry in Laramie County. It has historically provided substantial income and employment opportunities for farmers, ranchers and local businesses such as retail establishments, repair and other services.

The “natural fit” in US-USSR agricultural relations realised in 1972 has grown, albeit unevenly, over the course of the decade: exports have become critical to the profitability of the American agricultural sector; imports have become critical to the attainment of Soviet consumption goals. In the future, however, this “natural fit” would seem to be more functional within an East-West multilateral trading context than within a US-USSR bilateral trading context.

The CRITTER system is being developed to translate agricultural market reports between English and French. It is based on a transfer model, and designed to be reversible. The source and target language texts are described by means of: a) a surface syntactic representation consisting of a tree annotated with feature structures, built by an extraposition grammar, and b) a semantic representation exhibiting predicate argument structures and constrained by type checking, built in parallel with the syntactic structure in compositional fashion. CRITTERS's implementation is still incomplete, but results obtained so far are promising.

Substitutability among United State exports and exports of various competing countries in the world agricultural market is investigated using an elasticity of substitution model (ES). The ES estimation uses OLS, 2SLS, SUR, 3SLS. Data for corn and wheat in nine import markets are used, considering the possibilities of lagged ajustment, correlation of errors across import markets and endogeneity of export prices.

C ONSIDERABLE interest has been expressed recently in improving C_y agricultural market forecasts for both public and private purposes.2 To facilitate the development of alternative market forecasting procedures, two production cycles-beef and pork-were studied in terms of the several interacting components of these cycles. Commercial beef and pork production in each cycle was related, first, to the level of livestock inventories on farms and, finally, to the level of market prices at the time of decision making in livestock production. In this study the beef and pork output cycles were decomposed into the livestock classes and the time sequence of interrelated events that meaningfully characterize their operation during the 12-year period, 1949-1960. Though a rather short period of years was included in the estimation of the functional relationships, the data were adequate for showing some relevant interrelations among the price and quantity variables that depict the operation of the beef-pork economy in the United States.