A FIVE-YEAR FARM MANAGEMENT SURVEY IN OHIO. 51 
are very likely to affect one group of farms as much as another in a 
given year, so that it may be said safely that the variations in crop 
yields on different farms or groups of farms in an area with similar 
soil and climatic conditions are due more to variations in the farm 
practice on the different farms than to the conditions just named, 
and that the crop yields on the different farms are therefore one 
indication of the quality of the business conducted on them. 
Receipts per animal unit are considerably affected by the prices 
received for the live stock and its products, by the time of selling, or 
by live-stock losses, but within a given area differences in receipts 
are often the results of actual differences in the quality of the stock 
or of differences in the live-stock practices on different farms. These 
practices, however, have been worked out or applied by the farmers 
after such study of the marketing problem and the problems of 
feeding and the care of stock as to enable them to reduce live- 
stock losses to a minimum and to have the right kind of stock to 
sell at the right time. The receipts per animal unit may therefore 
safely be said to be a very good indication of the quality of the 
live-stock part of the farm business. 
The crop yields per acre and receipts per animal unit have been 
worked out by comparing the crop yields and receipts per animal 
unit on each farm for each year with the average yields and re- 
ceipts for all farms for that year. This was done because the average 
yields of crops and receipts per animal unit were not uniform from 
year to year, owing generally to causes not entirely under the 
control of the farmers, such as weather conditions, insect injuries, 
or live-stock prices. Thus in this study of the effect of quality of the 
farm business upon profits, each farm was used as many times as 
there were yearly records for that farm, or a total of 245 records. 
In Table XVI are shown the effects of the size and the quality of 
the farm business upon the labor income. In determining the effect 
of either of those factors, care must be exercised to make sure that 
the profits shown are not the resultant of a combination of the two 
factors, rather than of the one it is desired to study. To eliminate 
this source of error as far as possible, when determining the effect of 
quality upon farm profits, the records were grouped into three size 
groups (by crop area) , and each of these into three groups based upon 
the quality of the business. From these groupings, the effect of the 
quality of the business upon the average labor income of groups of 
from 20 to 36 farm records with similar crop acreages may be noted 
by reading the table from left to right. The effect of the size of the 
business when the quality is similar may be noted by reading the table 
downward. 
It will be seen that both size and quality have decided effects upon 
the labor income, and that qualhVv is fully as important as size. The 
