PRIMARY RESULTS 65 



The maximum number of working days in a year is 312, 

 a total obviously impossible of attainment in practice. 

 Such records as are available show that the days actually 

 worked by horses on the farm will not usually exceed four- 

 fifths of the maximum. 1 More time may be lost in summer 

 than in winter, a fact not generally realized, and the period 

 of maximum unemployment falls between hay-making and 

 harvest. The busy seasons are, of course, the autumn 

 and the spring, when the preparation of the ground for 

 winter and spring corn is going actively forward. In the 

 following graph the time lost by forty-one horses on four 

 farms, distributed pretty evenly over the whole of England, 

 during the year 1918, is shown for each month of the year 

 in percentages of the maximum working days per month, 

 that is to say, deducting only Sundays and Christmas Day. 



Although the curve represents an average of four farms 

 it is noteworthy that the results on the individual holdings 

 varied one from another in degree only, and that the 

 months of maximum and minimum employment were the 

 same in every case. The fact that the busiest times of 

 the year synchronize more or less with the seasons when 

 the weather is more uncertain directs attention to the advan- 

 tages which should accrue to farm-management from the 

 application of speedier mechanical power to field operations 

 in substitution for the slower horse labour (see p. 73). 



The horse account, in conjunction with the manual 

 labour analysis, furnishes the cost of all acts of tillage. 

 When the allocation of manual and horse labour is properly 

 made, and the cost of each is known, it is a simple matter 

 to extract the cost of ploughing, cultivating, harvesting, and 

 all similar operations, and it may be possible to establish 

 * unit costs ' for the farm, or even for a district, which in 

 certain circumstances might be applied to cost calculations 

 for a short period in substitution for the more laboriously 



1 It is probable that there may have been an occasional omission of a horse 

 from the record sheets from which the table is compiled, and if allowance is made 

 for ' experimental error ' the total days worked must be regarded as slightly 

 under-esti mated . 



2471 ,3, 



