2 BULLETIN 3, TJ. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGEICULTUEE. 
to secure the greatest profit without impairing the efficiency of any 
factor of production. In attempting to bring about and maintain 
this profitable adjustment, every farmer consciously or otherwise 
utilizes and is limited by physical and economic factors peculiar to 
the farming business. 
From the investigational viewpoint, the individual farm with its 
cropping system, practice, equipment, current operations, and general 
organization is a means to an end, and farm management is concerned 
with the farm unit only in so far as it affords impersonal data from 
which general principles can be formulated and applied to farms of 
its type and the conditions and possibilities of its locality. For 
purposes of investigation as well as use, the elements of farm equip- 
ment which affect the management of farms have been considered 
in two classes, which are here briefly referred to and defined in order 
to develop the relation between the science and practice of farm man- 
agement and the subject matter of this bulletin. One class of ele- 
ments relates to the investment in equipment and the other to the 
operation of equipment, the first being termed "investment factors" 
and the second " operating factors.'' Operating factors are further 
classified into "seasonal" and "dairy" factors. 
INVESTMENT FACTORS. 
By assembling masses of data from many farms, covering either 
the entire organization of each or selected elements only, useful facts 
and factors not previously known can be made available. As a com- 
paratively simple illustration, let it be assumed that it is necessary 
to determine the optimum investment to be made hi outbuildings 
for a certain 200-acre farm. It is not safe to depend upon direct 
mathematical calculation on the basis of the physical needs for farm 
storage, since the investment is limited by the farm income and the 
physical demands must be to a certain "degree subordinated to the 
economic. Neither would it be wise to depend upon the example of 
but one practical farmer who had recently decided the matter for 
himself, since the individual must have had but little information to 
guide him and may have made serious errors, such as building in a 
year of big crops and investing so much that his farm pays no inter- 
est on the expenditure, or he may have been compelled to build in a 
"lean" year and may have invested so little as to be unduly cramped 
for space and may be incurring losses through damage and inconven- 
ience, 
If, however, many 200-acre farms in an area are examined, a nor- 
mal investment factor, representing a considerable period of time and 
typical of those farms which are both physically adequate and finan- 
cially solvent, can be taken as the optimum factor desired. Simi- 
larly, the distribution of investment in all classes of equipment can 
