372 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



another 4 cents, and still another 5 cents a quart in a given 

 city milk belt, yet each of these men may be doing the type 

 of farming which pays him best, and the industry may be stable 

 so long as relative prices remain the same. Likewise the ques- 

 tion of joint costs is avoided, for it is no longer a question of the 

 cost of a specific product, but of comparing the total farm profits 

 resulting from the various types of farming and from the dif- 

 ferent competing elements in each kind of farming. Further- 

 more, the question of charging feed at market price or cost of 

 production would seem to pass with the effort to find specific 

 costs. However, something akin to this latter problem remains. 

 The farmer may compare the profits he would make if he sold 

 his corn, oats, and hay at present market prices instead of 

 feeding them to cows and selling milk. In this he should not 

 assume that if the community turned from milk selling to 

 crop selling the prices of all these crops would be what they 

 were before the change, neither should he assume that his 

 crops would yield the same if he changed to grain growing 

 for the market. Oats and corn are used directly for human 

 food and have many other uses, and are so easily shipped that 

 there would continue to be a market for them if not used as cow 

 feed ; but clover hay is a stock food and it is not so easily mar- 

 keted. The important alternatives uses for clover if not used for 

 cows are (1) to feed to beef cattle, (2) to sheep, or (3) to plow 

 under as a fertilizer, any of which conserves its value as a land 

 builder for grain growing. Where clover has entered into 

 commerce it has usually been as a feed for dairy cows. When 

 discarded for this use, therefore, the marketing of clover hay 

 could not be counted upon. A farmer in the Chicago milk 

 district, for instance, insists that it pays better to sell grains 

 and plow the clover under than to make clover hay and feed it to 

 live stock. He is practicing this system and is satisfied. In 

 this and similar cases it is the alternative use value rather than 

 cost or present market price which becomes the basis of compar- 

 ing the profits of types of farming, and hence the basis of choice. 

 This means that formally assigned specific costs are of little 

 use in the discussion of price-fixing where the products in 



