SIZE OF THE FARM 13 



to economical horse labor is even more impor- 

 tant than to adapt it to man labor. 



If a man is alone on a farm he is working at 

 a disadvantage in numberless ways. The 

 horses are idle while he is doing chores. If he 

 takes a trip to town the whole machinery of the 

 farm stops, for horses, tools, and man are all 

 of? their work. There are a thousand and one 

 little jobs that two men can do in a minute that 

 would take one man fifteen to do alone. 



A man is non-divisible; he cannot do two 

 jobs at once. But part of the cost of a horse 

 is the necessary oversight of its work by a 

 driver. That can be divided, for one man can 

 drive four horses as well as he can one. And 

 much of the modern machinery is made for the 

 use of a three- or a four-horse team. The re- 

 sult of this is shown in the census figures for 

 ten years. In 1880 a man cared for twenty- 

 three acres of crops, but in 1890 he was caring 

 for thirty-one acres. This simply meant that 

 by the use of four-horse teams a man was cov- 

 ering more land in the same length of time, for 

 during that period the amount of land that a 



