Table 4. — Custom Work Hired for Operations on Crops and Land Improvement 

 by 19 Dairy Farmers in Belmont, New Hampshire, 1949 



and land-improvement work was done. Custom operations required 273 job- 

 hours and 398 man-hours, which was about 4 percent of the total number 

 of hours required for crop- and land-improvement work on the 19 farms. 



If these three groups of farms are an adequate sample of the amount 

 of custom work hired in 1949 for crop- and land-improvement work on 

 New England dairy farms which have herds of more than 10 milking cows, 

 then approximately 560,000 hours of job time and 675,000 man-hours were 

 procured from off the farm by New England commercial dairy farmers. ^ 

 The sample farms hired about $195 worth of custom work per farm in 1949. 

 If this figure is reduced to $150 per dairy farm to offset some of the heavy 

 expense for land-improvement work done on the larger farms in the Lebanon 

 group, it indicates that New England commercial dairy farmers probably 

 hired between 3 and 3.5 million dollars worth of custom work in 1949. The 

 expenditures for custom work by the 37,063 farms of all types which hired 

 some machine work done amounted to 5.6 million dollars in 1949, according 

 to the United States Census of Agriculture, 1950. 



Custom Work Performed 



Specialized custom operators did a much larger volume of work per 

 operator than individual farmers who performed similar services. Average 

 gross dollar volume in 1949 was about $8,500 for the 12 operators inter- 

 viewed. Job time per operator was about 1,200 hours annually (Table 5). 

 Income from work done on land clearing and land improvement amounted 

 to about a third of the total gross income. Other jobs performed by this 

 group of operators were not restricted to work on dairy farms. However, 

 a breakdown of jobs performed, acreage of work, and receipts indicates that 

 a major part of the work was done on dairy farms. Harvesting crops and 

 preparation of land were the two leading types of work next to land clearing 

 and improvement work. Only about 7 percent of the receipts of these oper- 

 ators came from miscellaneous sources, such as snow removal or wood saw- 



1 The United States Census of Agriculture, 1945, reported 22,454 New England 

 dairy farms on which there were more than 10 milking cows. 



