30 CONFERENCE ON MILK PROBLEMS 



one part of the whole; another man is placed at another machine 

 to make another part; and then all of these parts are brought to- 

 gether from these different departments to the assembling room, 

 where girls or boys simply take one part out of each little tray and 

 put them together, and lo and behold! there is the lock or the 

 watch. Under those conditions, no skill is required except the 

 genius that is required to invent the machinery and build the 

 machinery; but after the machinery is once built, the manufacture 

 of the lock or the watch requires no skill any more at all. Con- 

 sequently, those trades have become obsolete. 



It has been the same way with the machinist. The all around 

 machinist has disappeared. He is either a good lathe hand, a 

 good press hand, or a good planer hand; but the all around machin- 

 ist has disappeared. 



Farmers cannot avail themselves of the principles upon which this 

 change has been built. They cannot have men do nothing but 

 milking, plowing, sowing or reaping. The work is constantly 

 changing. The men have to follow the work as of old. This re- 

 quires plasticity, and adaptiveness to frequent changes. While it 

 is true that this situation has been ameliorated in one direction 

 through the introduction of improved farm machinery whereby the 

 total number of units of labor required has been reduced, it has, 

 however, been augmented by the very remedy enumerated through 

 the increased demand of skilled labor to operate the machinery used. 

 In brief, the farms now require a much larger percentage of skilled 

 labor, but are prohibited from employment thereof because of the 

 limitation of wage imposed by the price obtained for produce sold. 

 Particularly is this true upon dairy farms. 



Moreover, all labor employed in most all other industries is 

 placed or handled in compact groups or places, capable of com- 

 prehensive, close and, when necessary, of exacting surveillance, con- 

 ditions rarely possible on dairy farms. Consequently, laborers who 

 chafe or resent factory conditions naturally drift to farms where 

 the environment is less irksome. This points clearly to low effi- 

 ciency and reflects actual conditions. For our labor is largely of 

 the foregoing type or recruited from foreigners whose efficiency, no 

 matter how ambitious the effort to do may be, is governed by 

 knowledge of our language which, in the majority of cases, is ad- 

 mittedly nil. 



Just stop a moment and think of the dairy farms. We have 

 practically none but foreigners in the section in which I am. I do 

 not question their willingness or their desire to work, or their am- 

 bition; I will concede that they are just as good and better than I. 

 But what is their effect upon the milk supply that we are discuss- 



