248 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



A successful engineer would not expect to buy a bank and become 

 a successful banker without some experience in the business, yet many 

 men feel that since they have made a success in the city they can 

 start farming without any experience and expect to make a profit at 

 once. There is probably no occupation in which experience is more 

 necessary and in which so much time is required to obtain the experi- 

 ence. City industries are very specialized. Farming calls for experi- 

 ence with weather, diseases, insects, plant feeding, animal feeding, 

 breeding, machinery, business affairs, and a hundred other things that 

 it takes time to learn. The only safe way for an inexperienced man 

 to begin farming is by working for a good farmer. If one begins for 

 himself, he should put his theories into cold storage and follow the 

 practice of the most successful neighbors as closely as possible for the 

 first few years. Even then he will make mistakes enough. The worst 

 mistake of all is to assume that the farmers are all ignorant and 

 unbusinesslike. They are the fathers and brothers of our mighty 

 "captains of industry" and are usually as efficient for their conditions 

 as the successful city man is for his. Inexperience is so serious a 

 handicap that farmers are very loath to hire anyone from the city 

 except for very simple kinds of work, as picking fruit, picking up 

 potatoes, weeding, and similar tasks. 



If one desires to have a chance to learn all phases of farming, he 

 should not expect much pay until he becomes of use. If an inexpe- 

 rienced person is allowed to use machinery and take care of stock and 

 crops, the farmer is almost certain to have serious losses, unless he 

 has another person to watch the beginner almost constantly. 



70. MACHINERY NOT ENTIRELY A SUBSTITUTE FOR LABOR 1 

 BY CARL W. THOMPSON AND G. P. WARBER 



The importance of the increased use of machinery has been dis- 

 cussed. Attention has been called to the changes wrought by the 

 introduction of such labor-saving devices as the self-binder, hay- 

 loaders and stackers, self-feeders, and gasoline engines for pumping, 

 churning, and washing, until it is believed by many people that 

 machine processes have become so extended that the present-day 

 farmer has but to sit around all day with a wrench and oil-can in 

 hand, from the time he starts the milking machine going in the morn- 



1 Adapted from Social and Economic Survey of a Rural Township in Southern 

 Minnesota, University of Minnesota Studies in Economics, No. i, pp. 8-n. 



