THE PRESENT PERTINENCE OF VON THÜNEN THEORY.

Two main sets of spatial cost variations influence the geography of commercial agricultural production. These are marketing costs and production costs. Marketing costs vary spatially mainly through the effects of varying distance to the market, even with the much flaunted improved and more efficient means of transport. Production costs vary with prices of factors of production, and with amounts of factors necessary to produce a given quantity of output. The determination of factor price is, in reality, the extremely complex result of the interaction of a host of forces influencing factor demand and factor supply.