Twice during the past five years the peculiar problems of the agricultural industry in the political economy have been analysed with acute perception in papers presented to this Association. There is a surprising unanimity of opinion among economists as to the nature of these problems; there is also, I believe, a rather wide area of agreement as to the general principles upon which policy designed to cope with these problems should be based. There is something of a gap between the way in which organized agriculture would attempt a solution to what, for the moment, I shall call “the farm problem” and that recommended by the economist. It is my purpose in this paper to attempt to explore the nature of this gap. Since more often than not this discrepancy in policy recommendations revolves around the function of the price system I have chosen the label “the farmer and the market.”