SO 
FIFTEENTH REPORT. 
FARM ORGANIZATION AS A FACTOR IN AGRICULTURAL 
ECONOMICS. 
BY W. 0. HEDRICK. 
Agriculture lias shared but slightly in the great development which her 
sister occupations have enjoyed through the benefits of organization 
efficiencies. The fact of immovability on the part of the farm is named 
by Alfred Marshall as one of the reasons why farming can never benefit 
from the specialization and integration processes of which organization 
everywhere is the product. “The characteristic of manufacturing in- 
dustries," says Professor Marshall, “which makes them offer generally 
the best illustrations of the advantages of production on a large scale — 
organization characteristics — is their power of choosing freely the lo- 
cality in which tltey will do their work, as contrasted with agriculture 
and other extractive industries (mining, quarrying, fishing, etc.), the 
geographical distribution of which is determined by nature.” 
Agriculture's greatest disability, however, from the standpoint of or- 
ganizational possibility arises from its limited opportunities for the use 
of capital. Most of the characteristics which make the use of 
capital so profitable in manufacturing seem absent from agriculture. 
No such a mass of capital could conceivably be used with profit for 
example in cultivating the soil enclosed within the area of a factory as 
is employed profitably within the factory itself since the quick limits 
within which the cultivation of the soil is profitable owing to its physi- 
cal and chemical composition closely restricts the amount of capital 
which can be applied to any given area. But in addition to the early 
failure in agriculture of profits on account of the natural limitations of 
the soil, a large use of capital in this industry seems impracticable 
from other reasons. In comparison with the factory agricultural pro- 
cesses are not closely enough connected nor continuous enough to uti- 
lize much of a division of labor or machinery. Quoting from Professor 
Marshall again. “In agriculture there is not much division of labor for 
a so-called large farm does not employ the tenth part of the labor which 
is collected in a factory of moderate dimensions. This is largely due to 
natural causes, to the changes of the seasons, and to the difficulties of 
concentrating a large amount of labor in any one place.” Almost con- 
tinuous employment, in fact, seems necessary in a factory to develop 
employment, in fact, seems necessary in a factory to develope profits 
from an expensive machine, but a machine is used only in ils proper 
season on a farm so that wide as is the revolution in agriculture which 
machinery has wrought true capitalistic production by this agency seems 
scarcely to be attainable. Underlying every possibility of using large 
capital in agriculture is the inability to successfully employ steam or 
other high class motor powers. As remarked by Professor Emerick. 
“The wealth concentrating power of steam is due to the fact that it 
has admitted in only a limited degree of direct application to agricul- 
