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I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I ~~~. {~.,-' v '-' .~~ ,j \10,_ i'l. in the price of wheat would cause a .045 percent decl ine in the production of feed grains lI, a .95 percent increase in the production of wheat, and a 0.25 percent decl ine in the production of soybeans. (The absence of a value in the tables at a coordinate presumes that value to be zero.l Table 11-6, Import Supply Elasticities, has non-zero values only on its diagonal, indicating that only the price of an import significantly affects the quantity available for importation. This is because the pro- duc tion of goods imported to the U. S. is from a 1 ess concentrated (compared to the U. S.l group of resources. Because the domestic production of crops and livestock compete for a more concentrated and identifiable group of resources, Table 11-5 has many more cross elasticities which represent the many more interactions in U.S. agricul tural production. On the demand side, food demand has the most interaction among the various commodities as shown in Table 11-7. This competition is especially strong among the animal products commodities. A number of cross elastici- ties have been computed for the important cereal slmeats trade-off in the consumers' diet. II Because of similarities in consumption characteristics, it is advanta- geous to treat all feed grains as a single equilibrium commodity. Corn, grain sorghum, oats, and barley are included under the assumption that enough of the feed grain consumed by livestock is processed in feed mill s and that feed mill s mix these grains in proportion to their nutri- tional value, thus insuring equilibrium of all feed grains at a common corn equivalent price. II-46