FARMERS EARNINGS IN SOUTHEASTERN PENNSYLVANIA 
43 
This procedure, however, has many accounting difficulties of its 
own, particularly in an old area like Chester County. This region was 
settled before the Revolutionary War, and the size of the farms and 
the number of buildings were largely determined long before the ex- 
tensive development in farm machinery in the second half of the last 
century. At present, corn planters and cultivators, wheat drills and 
harvesters, hay mowers and rakes are used on practically every farm, 
and many farms are also using such more recent machinery as hay- 
loaders, hay forks and slings, milking machines, and even tractors and 
gang plows. With the crops grown still largely the same as those 
frown when the first census was taken in 1850, one man to-day can 
andle much more land than he could handle before the introduction 
of modern machinery. This has resulted in a decided tendency to 
increase the size of farms. As a natural consequence of the gradual 
consolidation of farms, there are now more dwellings in the area than 
are needed to house the farm workers. With this surplus of buildings 
farms in many instances can be bought for less than the replacement 
value of the buildings alone (fig. 8). 
Recognizing this difficulty, no attempt was made at the time of 
making the survey, to divide the farm value into the value of the land, 
the value of the dwelling, and the value of the other buildings. To 
have attempted to get the separate values from the farmers would 
merely have been asking them to estimate something that they did not 
know. Had the value of the dwelling been obtained on this basis 
there would have been no way of separating the value of the dwelling 
from the value of the rest of the farm, as both figures would have been 
largely artificial ; and so no separation could have been made of farm 
and dwelling expenses. 
Instead, each farmer was asked to estimate the actual sales value 
of the farm as a whole and then to estimate the fair value of the 
buildings separately, considering the fire insurance he carried on 
them and the replacement cost. In making this second estimate he 
was told not to consider the value of the whole farm, but to estimate 
the building values solely as a separate question. The average 
values obtained by this process are shown in Table 39. 
Table 39. — Average value per farm of real_ 
estate and buildings 
Item 
Units 
Farms re- 
porting 
mush- 
rooms * 
Other 
farms 
Number of farms 2 
Number. . 
Acres 
Dollars 
Dollars 
Dollars 
Dollars 
Dollars.... 
54 
85.3 
10,896 
5,237 
16,185 
368 
Size of farms. ..... ......... 
104 1 
All real estate: 
Dwelling house 
6,020 
Dairy barns . . ... .. ... . 
4,866 
Other buildings . .. 
1, 106 
Total buildings, as reported 
32,318 
29,795 
11,992 
Total all real estate.. 
12,932 
1 This group includes two off-type farms which were later discarded as well as mushroom farms. 
2 This table includes several farms which were discarded in subsequent tabulations. 
It is evident that the '•values'' obtained by these questions are 
more than the buildings are really "worth," if by "worth" we mean 
what the buildings add to the market value of the farm. If this were 
