76 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



growth. There are no longer new settlers coming in to make a home 

 market for produce. It seems harder, for some reason, to get on. 

 First of all, the farmer needs to know how to reduce the cost of his 

 products. The prices he cannot control. He finds his margin of 

 profit insufficient. His one resource is to reduce costs. The farmer is 

 now only passing through an experience which all other industries 

 have encountered, but from which until lately the American farmer 

 has been exempt. When he inquires how costs of manufactured 

 articles have been reduced, he will find that in every instance it is the 

 work of scientific men mainly engineers and chemists. When he 

 understands this, he should at once be prepared to expect aid from the 

 same source. And he is getting it from that source. All that we 

 know as to commercial fertilizers we have learned from the chemists. 

 The entomologists and botanists have learned the life-histories of inju- 

 rious insects and fungi, and the chemists have compounded the ma- 

 terials for combating them. The veterinarian and entomologist have 

 located the cause of Texas fever in a parasite which the chemist has 

 taught us how to destroy, as he long since taught us how to eradicate 

 sheep scab. The physicist has learned how soils are formed, has 

 definitely classified them according to the size of their particles, and 

 discovered precisely how water behaves in the different classes. This 

 aids the farmers who understand such things to plant and till crops 

 with better judgment. 



But all this is only one aspect of the case. While the art of pro- 

 ductidn is possessed in some degree by all farmers, very little is known 

 by them of the science of marketing, and the art of maintaining busi- 

 nesslike methods is hardly understood at all. In the matter of redu- 

 cing costs, for example, very few farmers know the cost of anything 

 which they produce. The subject of reducing the cost of a product 

 can only be intelligently approached upon the basis of a record of the 

 details of present costs. It is not necessary to enlarge upon this, for 

 every farmer knows it. He does not keep these records in America, 

 because hitherto he has been able to live without it. A merchant who 

 has no competition within fifty miles need not know his costs very 

 accurately, for his selling price will be high enough to cover waste, 

 but to the merchant in a busy town every item of cost is essential and 

 is duly recorded. Increasing competition and deteriorating soils make 

 this equally essential to the modern farmer. 



I must place, as not only first, but far more important than all 

 other business information, the knowledge of what his competitor is 



