Farm Accounts, Profits, and Costs. [may, 



FARM ACCOUNTS, PROFITS, AND 

 COSTS.* 



H. G. Howell, F.C.A., 



Director of Agricultural Costs, Agricultural Costings Committee. 



Few would deny that there is an urgent need for farm 

 accounts to be kept on a much wider scale than hitherto. The 

 industry as a whole has probably lost considerably both in 

 money and efficiency by the prevailing neglect of farm book- 

 keeping. There is on this subject a surprising unanimity 

 in the reports of several Government Committees of Inquiry 

 which have been instituted recently. Without exception 

 they record the lack of information and urge the necessity 

 for more and better account keeping. 



It is not difficult to understand why farm book-keeping 

 has been neglected in the past. The term book-keeping 

 itself reeks of the town and the office and indoor work. The 

 farming community has been proud of its isolation and 

 distinctiveness from the town, and suspicious of all that is 

 connoted by factories, ledgers and the like. It has maintained 

 its high level of technical efficiency in the past without book- 

 keeping assistance. The average farmer is an open-air man 

 with a temperamental objection to account books, and with 

 little time and less incHnation to think about them. 



This state of affairs, however, is an old and closed chapter. 

 All the circumstances are altered. Farming has not escaped 

 the rapid flux and change which has been observable for a 

 nimiber of years, and has been accelerated during the last 

 five. The increasing cost of all farming expenses ; the pressure 

 of Income Tax Assessments ; increasing competition ; the 

 development of transport, tending to bring town and country 

 together — all of these combine to force the question of farm 

 book-keeping to the front. 



Kind of Accounts. — When speaking of farm accounts, I am 

 not referring to the farmer's Bank Pass Book. If he is xely'mg 

 on that to know his financial position from time to time 

 he is unwise. The position disclosed by the Pass Book is 

 too indefinite. Private transactions may be mixed up with 

 those of the farm, obscuring the results ; amounts owing to 



♦Resume of an address delivered to the Agricultural Club, 80, Pall Mall, 

 London, S.W. i, at their meeting on the nth February, 1920. 



