Proceedings of Seventeenth I^okmal Institute 203 



agi'iculture of the world where most of us will find a place will be 

 general farming — dairy, pasture, cereals and hay. With this type 

 of fanning, a man will not buy automobiles or send his sons to 

 college or maintain a very high standard of living on forty acres, 

 lie may do all these things on — say 200 acres, even with a rather 

 general and non intensive type of agriculture. But if he has 

 only forty acres it becomes his duty to do one of two things — 

 either to rent or buy more land, or else to adopt some special in- 

 tensive crops suited for small areas. 



Our commonly accepted ideas concerning the advantages of 

 small highly tilled farms will not stand the test of analysis. Ulti- 

 mately in America we shall approach the European ideals of inten- 

 sive agriculture, but not until both land and products are higher 

 in price than now. Other countries produce much more food per 

 acre than we, but no other land approaches us in the amount of 

 food produced for each man employed. Our system is the best 

 economy for the present at least. 



Of course, mere bigness of area is not in any way a guarantee 

 of success. The four hundred acre farm needs a four hundred 

 acre man to manage it, but with the right kind of control it has 

 far greater possibilities of profit than the little " place." To 

 employ a man and make him produce an amount in excess of his 

 wages is good business. The fact that a good sized farm permits 

 the employment of men beyond the owner and his family is only 

 one of its advantages. There is much machinery — binders, corn 

 harvesters, manure spreaders, potato diggers, hay loaders — where 

 the investment will be larger than is justified upon the small 

 farm, but which can properly be made a part of the invested 

 capital of the larger farm. So, too, horses — always one of the 

 most expensive factors upon the farm — are usually employed 

 more steadily and efficiently upon the larger areas. 



The man on forty acres will hardly be able to get along with less 

 than two horsesj but the man on 200 acres will hardly feel the 

 necessity of keeping ten. An idle horse is an expensive luxury 

 that ought to drive us to earnest thought on the subject. 



On the other hand there is surely a limit to the best size of a 

 farm. Bonanza farms have not tended to remain intact. Great 

 holding of land with superintendents and a peasantry brings in 



