be much lower than in most RUI counties. Interestingly, the density levels in the
deintensify, stable, and intensify counties were substantively that different from one
another, raising some interesting questions about what factors other than urbanization
might guide a county toward opposing trajectories (deintensify versus intensify in this
case).
Insert Table 5 about here.
Commodity Mix
In 1987, 56% of agricultural sales were generated from livestock production in
the average RUI, AI county. This had fallen to 49 percent in 1997. This relatively large
amount of total sales from livestock was initially surprising upon our first observing it.
Further, while we did anticipate counties experiencing decline or deintensification would
have larger amounts of livestock sales, the matter looks much more complex upon closer
examination. First off, there obviously can be differences in the relative price of
commodities across time that will impact the total agricultural sales of a county, and we
respect that some fluctuations in the value of particular commodities may be influencing
some of our trajectory characterizations. This being noted, we are able to describe some
interesting characteristics of our five types of counties that have merit regardless of
commodity price fluctuations. Rather than interpret the data in relation to hypothesis #5
and #6, both of which are somewhat supported by our findings, we will conduct this final
phase of the analysis by considering each particular trajectory and briefly describing the
dominant commodity characteristics, referring to data in Table 6, 7 and 8 as well as some
other data not tabled for this manuscript..
Convention