158 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



fectly natural that the employee should expect to be con- 

 sidered a part of the family. 



The size of the farm often grows with the family. As the 

 boys become able to help on the farm, the successful farmer 

 adds to its size with a view to having enough land for his 

 labor force, and with a view to having a piece of land for 

 each of the boys when they have grown up and want to com- 

 mence farming for themselves. Under these circumstances, 

 the splitting up of the farm as the boys start in on their own 

 account often results in a reduction in the size of the farm as 

 the family is dispersed. 



How will the decline in the size of the American farm family 

 affect the size of farms? In the first place, it will not only re- 

 duce the number of family workers per farm, but will tend to 

 reduce the number of paid laborers on farms. The principal 

 supply of satisfactory farm laborers is the boys from farm 

 families where the degree of prosperity has not been such as 

 to enable the farmer to expand his farm so rapidly as the family 

 labor supply has increased. With the decline in the size of 

 families, this source of labor is greatly reduced, and the laborers 

 who can be drawn from other sources are not so satisfactory 

 from the point of view of being skilled, subject to control, and 

 reliable. The most satisfactory solution of the farm labor 

 problem in many parts of the United States is to reduce the 

 size of the farm to what can be handled by the family. 



There are those who would not carry this so far as to reduce 

 the labor force below two men. " There are many farm opera- 

 tions that require two men, so that no matter how small the 

 farm may be, one man cannot do all the work to good advan- 

 tage." The whole question involved here is : will the advantage 

 of having another man right at hand for doing the two-man 

 jobs counterbalance the social and economic burden of keep- 

 ing him all the time ? The answer to this question depends upon : 

 (1) the managerial ability of the farmer in making a margin 

 of profit on hired labor, (2) his tact in handling men so as to 

 prevent the hired man from being a nuisance in the home, 

 (3) the possibility of hiring a married man who is efficient, 



