SIZE OF THE FARM 15 



One man, or two, work by themselves, perhaps 

 out of sight and sound of the next man. Exig- 

 encies of weather, insects, or other conditions 

 may cause a complete change of work at an 

 hour's notice and the whole organization be 

 upset. An overseer in a factory can inspect 

 the work of a thousand employees in thirty 

 minutes, but it would take him a year really to 

 inspect the work of a thousand men on a farm. 

 Moreover the distance to the fields from the 

 barn becomes a serious factor before we mul- 

 tiply that first unit of size very many times. 



The biggest saving is between the farm too 

 small to be efficient and the first unit of size, 

 for the area farmed by one hundred dollars' 

 worth of labor is five times as great on a hun- 

 dred-and-seventy-five-acre farm as on one of 

 thirty acres. 



Horse labor is more efficient on the large than 

 on the small area. On a fifty-acre farm one 

 horse cares for twenty-one acres of cultivated 

 crops, but on a two-hundred-and-sixty-acre 

 farm one horse will care for forty-nine acres of 

 crops. While a man will produce twice as much 



