ORGANIZATION OF THE AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISE 337 



There is a good lesson in the story of the Pennsylvania farmer with 

 a 4oo-acre farm who, after selling off 100 acres, found, by giving a 

 little better attention to the remaining 300 acres, that his sales were 

 in no wise diminished; later, after selling off 200 acres more, and con- 

 centrating all his energies on his remaining loo-acre farm, he made it 

 produce as much as did the original 400 acres. The writer knows of 

 a number of instances where ico-acre farms devoted to fruit culture 

 far exceed in production other fruit farms of 400 acres advantageously 

 situated. Under such intensive methods, the original fertility of the 

 soil is not so important a factor as are convenient markets, adaptability 

 to special crops, and other favorable conditions. 



106. FACTORS DETERMINING THE SIZE OF THE FARM 1 

 BY W. J. SPILLMAN 



The farms in the Atlantic Coast states were established at a time 

 when the family farm was necessarily small because of the lack of 

 labor-saving implements. The owners of these small farms produced 

 nearly everything they needed in the way of food and clothing. They 

 naturally produced a very small surplus, which went to feed the 

 cities. Under these conditions only a small proportion of the popula- 

 tion could live in cities, because the surplus of farm products over and 

 above the needs of farm families was so small. But about the time 

 when immigration began to flow over the Alleghany Mountains and 

 spread out in the broad Mississippi Valley, covering one of the most 

 extensive and most fertile agricultural regions in the world, improved 

 farm machinery began to be invented. This permitted a farm family 

 to farm a much larger area of land. 



The effect of this migration into the Mississippi Valley and the 

 development of more efficient farming with labor-saving implements 

 was overwhelming on the small farms of the Atlantic Coast. The 

 period between 1840 and 1850 witnessed the most tremendous revo- 

 lution in agriculture in the Atlantic Coast states that has ever occurred 

 in this country. A small hint of the disaster which overtook eastern 

 farmers during that decade is seen in the following facts: In Chester 

 County, Pennsylvania, which at that time was one of the leading 

 agricultural counties of the country and which still mam tains pre- 

 eminence as a farming region the number of swine fell from 65,000 

 in 1840 to 36,000 in 1850. These small Chester County farms, on 



1 Adapted from The Annals, May, 1915, pp. 69-70. 



