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 XX XIII 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 
