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And speaking of farmers. . . . It's apparently taking fewer of them to build the crop surpluses Reagan is trying to pare down. The Census Bureau says there were about 5.6 million people living on farms in 1980. By contrast, there were about 8.3 million living on farms in 1970. Iowa had the largest farm population in 1980, with 391,070. The state with the smallest number of farmers was Alaska, with 822.

Part of the decline came from a change in the government's definition of a farm and from updated urban-rural boundaries.m