CHAPTER II 



THE FACTORS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION 



.While the natural agents, heat, light, air, 

 moisture, and the soil, are all essential to agricul- 

 tural production, the farmer usually acquires 

 the use of all these when he buys or rents land, 

 and for this reason economists have commonly 

 included all these natural agents under the one 

 term land. Horses and other live stock, tools 

 and machinery, buildings, and general farm sup- 

 plies are also essential to modern agricultural pro- 

 duction. These, so far as they are used for pro- 

 ductive purposes, are classed together as capital- 

 goods. The term capital has been used by econo- 

 mists in the sense in which we here use the term 

 capital-goods, but it often happens that these 

 writers have in mind the money value of certain 

 instruments of production rather than the con- 

 crete things such as horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs, 

 or barns, plows, harrows, drills, and reapers, or 

 hay, grain, and fodder which are fed to productive 

 animals. The farmer deals with concrete things. 

 As the term land is used to designate something 

 concrete, so the term capital-goods will be used 

 in this book to designate certain other concrete 



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