Farmers^ Week in Agricultural College. 71 



view to occupy large areas of land, — it may mean prosperity to the 

 individual, but that it may be a decided disadvantage to the state. 

 For the commonwealth it is better that the farmer should be reduced 

 to the small area of land. It cannot be demonstrated that the cost of 

 production will be decreased by advocating smaller farms. Do you 

 think — and I am talking to the most successful farmers in the State 

 of Missouri who are fully capable of solving this problem — that if your 

 farms were divided up, and each 400 acre farm divided into ten 

 fanns, and on each of those forty acres a less efficient man was placed 

 as manager, that he could produce more from that forty acres than can 

 you? 



There must be organizing efficiency in order to accumulate wealth, 

 and it certainly is true that the man who by study and thought and 

 business sense has been able to build up and improve a large farm is 

 better able to secure from that land the maximum product than is the 

 less highly and efficiently trained man of less experience. 



Let us examine in detail this fact which is brought out very clearly 

 by ^iv. Hill — that reducing the size of the farm and devoting more 

 labor and care to the production of the crop will decrease the cost of 

 production. Now modern agriculture, so far as it pertains to the 

 staple crops, cannot be successfully conducted under modern conditions 

 without the use of labor-sa\'ing tools. It cannot be conducted for two 

 reasons, at least : One is, that we cannot now secure the necessary hand 

 labor, and the other is that it is cheaper, even if we could get the labor, 

 to bind wheat with a self-binder or com with the corn binder than by 

 hand. The small farmer cannot afford to own those tools. It is very 

 easy to demonstrate the fact that the man who cuts twenty acres of 

 wheat in a year cannot possibly afford to own a self-binder. The in- 

 terest on the original investment, the depreciation in the machine, and 

 the other fixed charges that will be the same whether he cuts twenty or 

 eighty acres makes it impossible for the small farmer to own so expen- 

 sive a machine for so small a use. The only possible way that we can 

 use labor-saving machinery, and thus meet the present scarcity of farm 

 labor, is by having a sufficient volume of business so that we can afford 

 to own these machines. I cannot go any further into detail, but it is 

 a very easy matter to demonstrate the fact that a man who cuts twenty 

 acres of corn a year and owns his own corn binder will pay $2.50 an 

 acre for the privilege of owning the com binder, while the man that 

 cuts eighty acres with the same machine can do it for $1.50 per acre. 

 Under these conditions, the small farmer cannot produce corn cheaper 

 than the large farmer. The best example of the small farm is found in 

 New England. The most intensive farms and the smallest farms are in 



