FARM MANAGEMENT PRACTICE OF CHESTER COUNTY, PA. 15 
TYPES OF FARMING. 
One of the worst mistakes a farmer can make is to choose unwisely 
the enterprises that are to constitute the basis of his farm busi- 
ness. The swiftness with which disaster overtakes the man who 
makes a serious mistake of this kind causes the rapid elimination of 
types of farming wholly unfit in a given locality, so that, at least in 
the older sections of the country, we seldom find types of farming 
distinctly unsuited to their surroundings. But serious errors of this 
kind are made on a large scale in certain regions which are now un- 
dergoing settlement, and in others where real estate promotion 
schemes are based on the utterly false assumption that merely because 
the soil and climate of a region are adapted to the most intensive 
types of farming all the land can be devoted to the production of 
the most intensive crops without reference to the possibility of 
marketing the products. 
In all sections of the country changes in economic or other con- 
ditions sometimes render well-established types of farming unsatis- 
factory, and it becomes necessary for farmers to make more or less 
radical changes in their practice. Attention has already been called 
to the changes in the eastern States which began about 1840, and 
which involved the practical destruction of the eastern sheep in- 
dustry and a very great reduction in the importance of beef cattle 
and swine in the same region. 
Another example of the effect of changes in economic conditions 
necessitating changes in type of farming is seen in the gradual 
transfer in recent years of the butter-making industry from the 
Eastern States to the Middle West. In the latter region, because 
of the larger size of the farms, the greater natural fertility of the 
soil, and the more general use of labor-saving machinery, grains and 
forage can be produced more cheaply than in the North Atlantic 
States. Early in the history of the Middle West the quantity of grain 
and forage produced made feedstuffs very cheap, and especially in the 
northern portion of the region the production of butter gradually 
became one of the leading industries. In some localities, especially 
in Wisconsin, cheese making also became a dominant enterprise. 
Butter and cheese can be shipped to eastern cities at relatively small 
expense. Under these conditions the makers of butter and cheese 
in the Eastern States found themselves hard pressed by the competi- 
tion from the West. A severe depression followed, and even yet the 
price of farm land in the East is only just beginning to reflect the 
better times that succeeded with the general development of the 
market-milk industry incidental to the enormous growth of eastern 
cities. Both butter and cheese making have been targely transferred 
to the West during the past third of a century. 
