180 



There is an equally great field for the efficiency expert on the farm. 

 Thus far most of the scientific promotion of agriculture has been devoted 

 to teaching farmers how to perform unit operations better. They have 

 been told how to select seed corn, how it should be cultivated, how to 

 fatten a pig, how to spray an apple tree; but a farm is a very complexly 

 organized group of activities, and the problem of their interrelation is 

 well illustrated by the case of Dr. Spillman's farm. Dr. Spillman, Chief 

 of the Bureau of Farm Management in the Department of Agriculture, at 

 Washington, took an old run-down farm in Missouri, got some very efficient 

 units of operation, raised the corn yield from 20 to 80 bushels an acre, but 

 found he was not making much money. Examination showed he had 

 been so impressed with the good unit of corn production that he had little 

 else, and therefore had a great pile of work to be done at the time of the 

 spring plowing and corn cultivation and but little the rest of the year, 

 with the result that the ten work horses ate up most of the profits of the 

 farm. By rearranging his crop system so he had constant work through- 

 out most of the year, the number of horses was reduced from ten to four, 

 and, while the output was not increased, the profits were increased several 

 fold. 



There is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. The old 

 way used to be, ''get a good man and turn him loose. He'll come out 

 all right." This dependence on genius is giving way before our increasing 

 faith in the results of scientific work that arises from the careful studying 

 out of the best way and then following it. 



Just here I want to emphasize the fact in this agricultural conference 

 that the application of the efficiency movement to the farm is more dif- 

 ficult than the factory, for the reason that the farm is often a more complex 

 thing than the factory, using a greater variety of raw materials, turning out 

 a greater variety of products, and using more sciences.. Furthermore, 

 this complex and scientific task must be carried on with a small staff, and 

 subject to the restrictive operations of the uncontrollable weather. 



But, after the efficiency movement is applied to the farm, what's 

 going to become of the crops? What good does it do us to produce better 

 potatoes if they rot in the ground, or increase their costs three-fold in getting 

 to market? Our whole system is full of just such unadjusted production 

 units. The student of industrial history, for example, tells us that in 

 Revolutionary times the best hand-spinner could make two threads at a 

 time, whereas now power-driven machines enable one spinner alone to make 

 12,000 threads at a time, a six-thousand-fold increase over the Revolution- 

 ary spinner, but does anyone claim that clothing is six thousand times as 

 abundant? This improvement, while rather extreme, is suggestive of 

 hundreds that have occurred in all forms of manufacture, and agriculture 

 has not been neglected. A statistician for the Industrial Commission 

 announces that in 1836 the production of a bushel of wheat required 183 

 minutes of human labor, while it required in 1896 but ten minutes, a ratio 



