MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
SI 
tural production; the age of steam lias given us a new urban life but 
has not directly transformed the country. Nothing indeed resembling 
the nse made of high grade motive forces in manufacturing or trans- 
portation has yet been found for agriculture nor is it clear that they 
may ever be largely employed. 
Widely different views concerning the merits of large scale farming 
seem to have been held two decades ago from those which have since 
become current. David A. Wells, writing in the early eighties com- 
ments interestingly on the great revolution in the business of agricul- 
ture which is yet to be effected by the cultivation of land in large tracts 
with the full use of machinery and under the factory system as a mat- 
ter which onl v the future can reveal, but it cannot be doubted, he held, 
that the shiftless, wasteful method of agriculture now in practice over 
enormous areas of the earth’s surface are altogether too barbarous to 
be much longer tolerated. Professor Liberty Bailey has given these 
views sympathetic endorsement — observing frequently, especially in re- 
cent addresses that the absence of entailment of large estates and the 
presence of popular suffrage in this country may be expected to be 
permanent safeguards against landlordism and he would be glad of the 
time when capital and skill should direct large rural enterprises at 
least in the remoter parts of the country. Indeed the basis for the be- 
lief that agriculture is to take on in the future thorough going business 
characteristics such as specialized laborers, power machinery, efficiency 
management, etc, etc., rest largely upon this assumption that farms are 
inevitably to become larger. Overhead organization, in fact, as it is 
called in industry can find out little place in agriculture until the farms 
have become of suitable size. 
The transformation of agriculture into a business in this country is 
mentioned by Bogart as one of the many economic effects of the civil 
war and the chief characteristic of this transformed occupation is the 
production of commodities for the general market. The earlier type of 
agriculture, as everybody knows, was largely of the domestic sort but the 
agriculture of our own day does not in the least aim at independence 
and self sufficiency but quite as unreservedly as other industries, offers 
its out-put upon the market. It is this new point of view from which 
the activities of the farm are directed, this purveying of the farmer to 
the market, which undoubtedly gives to agriculture its fullest identifi- 
cation with the contemporary world of industry. 
It is to emphasize this business point <>f view, to magnify it and to 
make it the supreme consideration in the carrying on of the farm which 
gives the study of farm organization its chief justification as a disci- 
pline in an agricultural college. On the other hand il is doubtless the 
desire for the economies which are to be found in organization and 
management, which the contemporary flourishing condition of agricul- 
ture has made worth while, that has given significance to the farm 
organization movement among practical working farmers and prompts 
the description from us which now follows. 
The variable nature of agriculture which results from the fact which 
Marshall described, namely, that farms are strictly localized by climate, 
soil and other natural conditions presents a pronounced hindrance to 
the easy analysis of farm operations. There is no uniformity of product, 
indeed, from the farm so that no one can proceed from function to 
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