FARM MANAGEMENT PRACTICE OF CHESTER COUNTY, PA. 67 



as a whole that our agriculture should be efficient from the stand- 

 point of the people on the farm or from the standpoint of the 

 capitalist who owns the land. Fortunately, as yet, in this country 

 the capitalist and the farmer are frequently the same, but even 

 where this is the case it is the income per farm family rather than 

 the percentage of profit on the capital invested which makes for good 

 citizenship in the country and for a high standard of living on the 

 farm. 



In making the calculations the results of which are shown in 

 Table XXXII the farm income is first reduced to percentage of 

 capital invested. In the first line of the table the value of the 

 farmer's labor is left out of consideration, the entire net income being 

 treated as the percentage of profit on capital invested. There is seen 

 to be relatively little variation in the figures for different sizes of 

 farms except that in the smallest and the largest groups the figures 

 are somewhat smaller than in the intermediate sizes, and in these 

 intermediate sizes the two smallest show a somewhat larger per- 

 centage profit than the three groups of larger farms. The last 

 line of the table was calculated by using the farmer's own estimate 

 of the value of his labor, subtracting this amount from the net farm 

 income, and then expressing the remainder as percentage profit on 

 capital invested. This method corresponds to that usually used in 

 industries where everyone connected with the business receives a sal- 

 ary. The average percentage profit calculated in this manner is 

 9.4 per cent for the 378 farms operated by their owners. Except for 

 the farms of 40 acres and less, there is comparatively little variation 

 in the profits. It is because profits have so often been figured in this 

 manner that the public has been misled as to the advantages of the 

 large as compared with the small farm. It is interesting to note, as 

 shown in next to the last column of Table XXXII, that the per- 

 centage profit on the tenant farms calculated by both methods is 

 larger than it is on the owner farms. We shall later see the reason 

 for this. 



The year in which this survey was made happened to be one which 

 was rather favorable to the mushroom business and the average 

 profits made by farmers who grow mushrooms were considerably 

 larger than those of the more usual types of farming in this region, as 

 is seen by the last column of Table XXXII. There are, however, 

 years in which the reverse is very distinctly the case. 



DISTRIBUTION OF PRODUCTIVE WORK UNITS. 



Table XXXIII gives some interesting data on the relative pro- 

 portion of the productive labor devoted to crops, live stock, and mis- 

 cellaneous purposes on the farms operated by their owners. There is 



