ECONOMIC PHASES 167 



taxation and other lines, both he and the public are certain to suffer 

 as a result. Here indeed lies great opportunity for fine discrimina- 

 tion in making all-important judgments on the part of farmers' 

 organizations. It will require both comprehensive information and 

 a high order of moral responsibility to make such decisions wisely. 



Because farming is a business of small units, more than one-half 

 of all the people employed in the entire industry must be possessed 

 of a degree of management skill adequate to assuming the sole 

 responsibility for the success of the business. This places a peculiar 

 handicap on farming as compared with many other industries. In 

 most of the manufacturing industries not more than one person in 

 five or six is required to take direct responsibility for other workers 

 or for the making of dividends. The inevitable result is that the 

 management skill employed in farming must in general be of a lower 

 grade than that employed in the large-scale industries. 



If in the future we are to continue to have small farms, efficiently 

 operated, we need to make every reasonable effort to maintain and 

 improve the management skill of our farm operators. This is already 

 being done in very large measure through our general educational 

 program in the state colleges of agriculture and in the secondary 

 schools. The extension agencies, developed mainly during the past 

 ten years, have already made a splendid contribution to the improve- 

 ment of management methods particularly in the technical processes 

 relating to production. The combined influence of resident teaching 

 in our colleges and secondary schools, and the extension work carried 

 on with actual farmers on their own farms, should go a long way 

 toward offsetting the handicap in management skill imposed upon the 

 farmer. 



STANDARDIZED SYSTEMS OF FARMING 



I believe we should go even farther than this. I believe the 

 experiment stations, through investigation of the most successful farms 

 in the various agricultural regions and through their other lines of 

 research, should be able in the relatively near future to make a be- 

 ginning in the development of somewhat standardized systems of 

 farming for each of the more important type-of-farming areas. I 

 appreciate fully that such systems would have to be made flexible 

 enough to meet the needs of individual conditions. However, where 

 soil types are fairly uniform and the conditions of climate, topography, 

 markets, and transportation facilities are in the main the same, there 

 must be at any given time a best system of farming which can be 



