CHAPTER II 



CAPITAL NECESSARY IN FARMING 



The capital account of a farm is a measure 

 of the size of the business. If all farms carried 

 on the same type of farming and all farm land 

 was worth the same price per acre, we could 

 use the acre as a measure of size. But the flor- 

 ist, with a few acres of high-priced land under 

 glass, may have more money invested in his 

 business than the cattle raiser with a thousand 

 acres of range land, or the truck grower may 

 intensify until the cost of his crops from a sin- 

 gle acre compares with that of a whole cotton 

 farm in the South. 



Analyses of farm accounts have shown that 

 the farmer 's return is in proportion to the capi- 

 tal invested, up to the amount where the size be- 

 comes unmanageable because of physical fac- 

 tors. That is, the larger the business, the big- 



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