

FARM MANAGEMENT PRACTICE OF CHESTER COUNTY, PA. 31 



add materially to the profits of the farm business, while if the enter- 

 prise be made either smaller or larger than this the profits are 

 reduced. Generally speaking, the farmers in the older settled agri- 

 cultural sections have arrived at this optimum magnitude for the 

 various enterprises they maintain on their farms. But they have 

 done this in response to the action of obscure economic forces which 

 are not clearly perceived. Hence many of them make mistakes in 

 the matter of the relative magnitude of the enterprises they main- 

 tain. One of the most important lessons to be learned from a study 

 of the kind reported in this bulletin is the position each enterprise 

 should occupy on the farms of a given locality for best results. In 

 order to be able to determine this point, however, it is necessary that 

 the survey include a large number of farms, and that these farms 

 may be separable into large groups in which approximately the same 

 mixture of farm enterprises occurs on all the farms within the same 

 group. 



The adjusted labor income, of wdiich use is made in the following 

 tabulations, has already been explained. (See footnote, p. 25.) It 

 has been calculated in such a way as to eliminate, as far as possible, 

 the effect of magnitude of business on the labor income. Within a 

 given region magnitude of business probably has more influence in 

 determining the profit made by the farmer than any other one factor. 

 In order to study the influence of less important factors satisfactorily, 

 it is therefore desirable to eliminate this one. It would also be highly 

 desirable to eliminate the factors of yields of crops per acre and 

 income per animal unit, which are the next most important in study- 

 ing such minor factors as percentage area of each crop, percentage 

 of income from each enterprise, etc., but the number of farms avail- 

 able for this study is not large enough to permit this. 



In some of the tabulations it will be seen that a relatively slight 

 change in the percentage area of a given crop, or in the percentage of 

 income from a given enterprise, appears to make a very decided dif- 

 ference in the profits made by the farmer. In some cases this differ- 

 ence is too great to be accounted for merely by the difference in 

 crop' area or in percentage income under consideration. This is 

 particularly true in the case of the relation between percentage of 

 income from fruit and labor income. (See p. 40.) A very slight 

 increase in percentage of income from fruit amounting to less than 

 1 per cent of the total amount of income from these farms is accom- 

 panied by an increase of 18 per cent in the average labor incomes. 



The reason for this is probably not because of the additional 

 profits secured from the sale of fruit, but because in the main it is 

 only the better class of farmers who take any care of their fruit 

 and who go to the trouble to market the small surplus of this com- 



