312 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



his brothers in other lines of industry. He is far from being as free 

 to enlarge or diminish the size of his labor force as is the manufac- 

 turer, hiring, discharging, and hiring again from an ever-available 

 labor supply. Nor can he shut down his plant for three months or 

 a year, or curtail or increase his acreage in mid-season to offset weather 

 conditions or to meet market developments. Farm projects move 

 in cycles of from one to several years. Idle horses must still be fed, 

 other stock must be kept up, and satisfactory laborers must be hired 

 on a season's contract. 



Likewise, the farmer often finds the size of the units of one or 

 more of the productive factors with which he must work fixed by 

 forces only partially within his control, and dictated by considerations 

 other than those of technical efficiency in his enterprise. For example, 

 the i6o-acre farm is an institution in this country whose reasons for 

 being are to be found in the book of the surveyor, not in the intention 

 of the farmer. So, too, the size of the labor force must all too often 

 coincide with the numbers of the family group, rather than with the 

 labor needs of the enterprise. Commonly the size of the capital factor 

 has been predetermined by the amount of wealth accumulated by the 

 farmer or inherited from his father, instead of being an amount ascer- 

 tained as necessary to maximum efficiency of operation. 



The ideal of farm organization would run something like this: 

 Once the enterprise was determined upon, it would be equipped with 

 such number and grades of workers, such quantity of land, and such 

 capital as would give it its greatest technical efficiency. What we 

 find in practice is strongly in contrast with this ideal. The farmer 

 has, let us say, 160 acres of ground, and could rent only in i6o-acre 

 or perhaps 8o-acre tracts, if at all. He has had his own labor and 

 such aid as a wife, a son, and two daughters could render him, but 

 has had limited opportunities of hiring what other help he needed and 

 when he needed it. He had, perhaps, a capital of $5,000 and inade- 

 quate facilities for borrowing other funds when they were needed in 

 the enterprise. With so large a number of limiting factors, each set 

 by circumstances unrelated to the technical requirements of farming 

 or to each other, the farmer has stood little chance of bringing his 

 organization to its largest profit-making point. 



There are two possible lines of attack upon problems of this sort. 

 First, we may attempt to remove the disabilities under which the 

 farmer works. Later chapters (on land tenure, labor problems, and 

 rural credits) set forth some of the suggestions which have been 



