82 
FIFTEENTH REPORT. 
process in his analysis of farm management as would be done in other 
industries. The meaning of the term farming itself has not received the 
identical definitions from equally good authorities. To some this un- 
dertaking is a thing from which rather highly finished products should 
be put upon the market and the whole trend of the pursuit should be 
in the direction of perfecting this manufacturing aspect and away from 
the production of raw materials. Competing with this definition is a 
more commonly accepted one that farming has for its purposes the 
production of grains, forages, fibres and roots, and all other farm en- 
terprises not identified with these are only significant to the extent that 
they preserve the soil and restore its fertility. Amid such diverse views 
in regard functions nothing can be established with regard to products 
except the rule that as many supplementary enterprises as possible 
should be conducted upon the farm and among the enterprises which 
are not supplementary to each other but which compete for the farmers’ 
time, those always which are most profitable should have the preference. 
This principle of the competitive and supplementary enterprises is 
largely the determinative one also in the establishment of the proper 
cropping or rotation systems. The chosen orders in which crops suc- 
ceed each other from period to period and which constitute the device 
of crop rotation are multitudeness in number and. merits of almost 
every conceivable sort have been assigned to favored ones by their ardent 
supporters. But, similarly to the use of an established order in a differ- 
ent art from agriculture, the use of the sequence in either whist or 
farming is chiefly defen sable on the grounds that in the Jong run it 
pays. The nature of the sequence in agriculture then is governed from 
rhe same standpoint as governs the choice of farm enterprises, namely, 
the selection of the products which in the long run will afford the 
greatest profits. 
The student of agricultural development in the United States finds 
no other phase more interesting than the one in which the operation 
of fhis principle of profitableness or unprofitableness in determining 
the succession of different types of agriculture in different localities of 
the country is shown. A selective efficacy closely resembling in fact 
that of the Darwinian struggle for existence has determined the enter- 
prises which shall survive in different localities and the misfits which 
shall go under. A somewhat superficial description of this situation 
asserts that within small areas Ihe markets determine the type of agri- 
culture which will be followed. Over large areas or natural divisions 
of the globe climatic and other natural conditions are in ihe main 
determinative. 
The farm establishment itself as contrasted with the farm enterprises 
affords the real opportunity for organization. Here are found in tlieir 
most elemental state, the land, labor and capital agents of our economic 
trinity, ihe varying divisions and combinations of which constitute the 
essentials of all economic organization. The tyranny with which its 
products controls Ihe fate of human kind — the function of land as the 
limiting factor upon human development— or, in the words of Professor 
Bailey, as the spring source from which raw materials flow, has made 
the disposition and management of land resources supremely important 
to society from the start. The. age long controversies over intensive 
or extensive, over tenant or proprietorship and over large or small 
