858 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



The amount of energy put forth by boys and girls in these har- 

 vesting processes is much greater than appears upon casual observa- 

 tion; indeed, the owner of one farm declared that the ten-year-old 

 daughter of his contractor topped five tons of beets daily. This repre- 

 sented the child's net achievement as a matter of fact, the total 

 tonnage was greatly in excess of this amount, because in the course of 

 the day a beet passes through the hands of a worker twice, first when 

 pulled, then when topped; moreover, the weight of soil and tops and the 

 condition of the ground must be considered. The aggregate weight 

 handled by the child daily is therefore much more than five tons 

 this ten-year-old girl was really handling from twelve to fifteen tons. 



Exposure to the weather in late autumn is another factor making 

 the work in the fields undesirable for young children. They are often 

 insufficiently clothed on cold days. Their hands become badly 

 chapped and many distressing cases of suffering are cited by school 

 teachers. It is by no means unusual to see families pulling and 

 topping in mid-November, when ice is in the furrows and keen, cold 

 winds are blowing. Sometimes the children work in the early morn- 

 ing and late evening by lantern light; and occasionally, when a 

 heavy frost is feared, the work is continued even on Sunday, particu- 

 larly toward the end of the season. 



Through energy, persistence, and thrift many families earn and 

 save enough money in a very few years to enable them to buy small 

 farms, but this worthy ambition ceases to be a virtue when pursued 

 at the sacrifice of the children's proper education and normal child- 

 hood. A prosperous beet raiser in the South Platte River district 

 keeps his six-, eight-, and ten-year-old children out of school to work 

 in the fields, although he owns more than two hundred acres of valu- 

 able land. Another family, consisting of father, mother, and two 

 girls aged nine and ten years, who worked 40 acres of beets in 1915, 

 own a good home in one of the large northern towns of the state; this 

 home is boarded up for -half the year while the family lives in a little 

 shack "in the beets." An eleven-year-old girl was found who, with 

 her sister aged seven, is kept out of school to work in the beet fields, 

 although her family boasted that they made $10,000 from their farm. 

 One parent declared to a school principal that his boy was worth 

 $1,000 for work during the beet season, but if he went to school he 

 was nothing but an expense. 



Financial considerations, and not the welfare of the child, lie at 

 the center of vision in the narrow perspective which characterizes the 



