32 The Farmer's Business Handbook 



destroys the symmetry and harmony of the ac- 

 counts. In practice, it is usually best to charge 

 the wheat field, for instance, with ten hours and 

 temporarily ignore the other hours. There will 

 be many fractions of days when it will be diffi- 

 cult to find any legitimate account to which to 

 charge these fractions of days or hours. All 

 farmers know how showers may break up the 

 operations of the day. The workmen come to 

 the barn and wait to see whether they may not go 

 back to the field. The rain continues, and after 

 a time they are set to "tinkering," or, in the ab- 

 sence of the manager, may take the opportunity 

 to ease off the day's labor by pitching quoits; and 

 no one blames men who work from "sun to sun" 

 for doing so. These fractions of days of lost 

 time or half -lost time of the month hands, may 

 be charged to teams or to live stock, as one's 

 judgment may indicate. Then, too, there is al- 

 ways some Sunday work. This had better not be 

 kept account of, or the problem will become still 

 more difficult. 



Or, call each work-day ten hours, but charge 

 a just proportion of it to stock or teams, and to 

 hay or wheat field, as the facts warrant. To 

 illustrate : a man who milks morning and even- 

 ing and works in the field the greater part of 

 the day might have one and a half hours of his 

 time charged to stock and eight and a half hours 



