LARGER ASPECTS OF FARMING 93 



farmer who gets his land before the rise comes, would enjoy the ad- 

 vantage of owning higher priced land, and could get more money for 

 it if he ever decided to sell. 



THE UNIT OF ORGANIZATION 



Again, this is not peculiar to farming. The efficiency with which 

 the farmer organizes and directs the working force of his farm has 

 many phases, and depends upon the solution of a vast number of de- 

 tailed problems. Almost every business, if it is organized at all, is 

 organized around some unit, such as a power plant, an expensive 

 piece of machinery, or a rarely endowed manager. Some farming en- 

 terprises are organized around a mule, a tractor, a plot of land, a fam- 

 ily as a working unit, or a manager. In every case the size of the en- 

 terprise is determined by the capacity of the unit around which the 

 business is organized. Where land it not a merchantable commodity, 

 the acreage of the farm itself is not easily increased or decreased. It 

 becomes, therefore, the unit around which the business must be or- 

 ganized, and the size of the business is necessarily determined by the 

 capacity of the farm. Where land is a merchantable commodity, the 

 acreage can be increased or decreased to suit the capacity of the man- 

 ager. It is his capacity, therefore, rather than the predetermined 

 acreage of the farm that determines the size of the business. 



Where the predetermined acreage of the farm is the unit, the 

 question is, how intensively to cultivate that acreage; that is, how 

 much labor and capital to apply to its cultivation. The answer is 

 obvious to every student of economics : As many units of labor and 

 capital must be applied as will, one year with another, enable the last 

 units applied to just pay for themselves; or the last application of 

 labor and capital on the farm to just pay its cost in the increase of 

 yield. 



Where there is no predetermined acreage, the manager must re- 

 gard his own capacity, rather than the size of the farm, as the limiting 

 factor. That is, he must increase or decrease his acreage as freely as 

 he would his labor force or his supply of tools and equipment. But 

 he must remember that his capacity is as limited as is that of his land 

 or that of any part of his equipment. If he tries to run too big a busi- 

 ness, he must of necessity give somewhat less attention to details. He 

 must spread himself thinly, as it were, over a large business. He 

 must, however, enlarge his business until the last unit of a combined 

 factor "land-labor-capital" just pays for itself. If he stops short of 

 this, so that an additional unit of "land-labor-capital" would more 



