12 THE NEW BUSINESS OF FARMING 



America has plenty of farm land. Labor 

 costs more than land. So the economic factor 

 in farming is not the amount of produce which 

 an acre of land will raise but the amount which 

 a man can produce. It is the man who raises 

 two blades of grass where man raised but one 

 before who is the benefactor of his race; not 

 the one who forces a given spot of ground to 

 double its production. That may cost too much 

 in human labor, and human labor is what we 

 wish to save. 



In building up a farm business, then, we must 

 consider land in terms of labor. It is not good 

 business to have so little land that labor is 

 wasted or, for any reason, used inefficiently. It 

 is better to have a few acres of land idle at an 

 interest cost of a dollar or two an acre rather 

 than to have a three-hundred-dollar man sitting 

 around in front of the stove. 



It costs nearly as much to keep a team of 

 horses as it does to keep a hired man. But a 

 horse will do ten times the field work that a 

 man can do. So, to adapt the size of the farm 



