364 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



themselves upon doing one thing well. The farmer alone is the 

 jack-of-all-trades. Though the trend is toward specialized lines of 

 production, the farmer's labor remains, as it was in the beginning, 

 unspecialized as to processes. With the coming of more complicated 

 agricultural machinery to be handled, and the growing necessity for 

 thorough study of soils, of insect pests, and of the markets, the 

 farmer is yearly brought face to face with more complex demands. 



To manage and do the major part of the labor, satisfactorily, on a 

 farm of eighty acres, demands on the part of the farmer several lines 

 of proficiency which are seldom found combined in any one individual. 

 He must have the strength and physical endurance of the unskilled 

 laborer, combined with the ingenuity and mechanical ability of the 

 skilled workman. He must be somewhat of a student, an authority 

 on matters connected with the science of agriculture. As a student, 

 he must also have something of the spirit of the investigator and 

 experimenter, for his own farm presents problems for which he can 

 find no solution in the books. He must be a business man competent 

 to manage a large and complicated undertaking, or much of his labor 

 will be wasted. The typical farmer, in his attempt to make a credit- 

 able showing upon each of these counts, attains no better than second- 

 rate efficiency in any single line. Comparisons with the city expert 

 are bound to make him uncomfortable. However, such comparisons, 

 although unjust to the individual, are yet inevitable. It is told to all 

 that he is a poor business man, a superficial student, a bungling 

 mechanic, and a clumsy laborer. He is made to feel that he is a 

 misfit on the land and in the work of his inheritance. He is rather 

 severely punished for marching, in the rearguard of a vanishing 

 procession. 



The pioneer days are over. The present call of the land is not 

 unlike the call to other activities. It is to men who have money to 

 invest, and to those who have expert knowledge and ability of some 

 sort. As the farming class was called into being by the existence of 

 abnormal land conditions, it is very natural to expect that as con- 

 ditions become normal the class will be merged back into the society 

 from which it sprang, and the task of agricultural production taken 

 over by the classes of modern industrial organization by the capi- 

 talist, the manager, and the laborer. The laws of social and economic 

 development which brought the factory are in operation still. Agri- 

 culture is but a form of manufacture, and its development must be 

 along the lines marked out by the development of manufacturing in 



