Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 254, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 October 1916 — FARM & GARDEN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

FARM & GARDEN

DOES THE FARM PAY? Demonstrators Point out the Difference in Results Between Good and Bad Management In every community there are certain number of farmers who have found for themselves how to make a good profit from their farms. They are now being used by county agents as practical object lessons for their less successful neighbors. Under what is known as the farm management demonstration plan, the county agent analyzes the systems that these men have adopted, compares them with the practice on farms that pay less or not at all, and learns in this way the factors that make for successful farming in a given community. He is then in a position to say: ‘‘This is the kind of farming that pays. If you don’t believe me, look around you. It’s not a theory, It’s a fact.” The demonstrations of this kind that the Department of Agriculture, cooperating with the state colleges of agriculture has made already, afford some striking instances of the difference in results between good and bad farm management. Recently 04 groups of farms in 19 states were studied in order to ascertain what the farmer , obtained for his year’s work after deducting the interest at 5 per cent on the value of farm and ether capital—in other words, to find out his labor income or wages. In each of these groups, which included altogether 4,400 farms, the conditions were reasonably similar. In each group the farmers were divided into five numerically equal classes according to their labor incomes. It was found that although the average labor income for all the groups was only $387, the average for the farmers in the first class— that fifth of the farmers who did best —was sl,421. In the second class it was $642. The last class—the fifth of the farmers who were least successful—got nothing for wages and lost, on the average $517. That is to say the investment on the amount of pioney represented by their farm, stock, and equipment would have been $517 more than the farm returned them. It should be borne in mind in this connection the labor income is merely the farmer’s wages and that the family has in addition, besides interest on investment, the use of the farmhouse and such fuel and food as thje farm supplies free of money cost. Other demonstrations {iave produced similar results. In moit any northern community, one fifth of the farmers are making approximately SI,OOO a year more than the average and $2,000 more than the least successful. This is not luck, nor is it altogether, or even chiefly, a question of the individual farmer. Further analysis will

show that the successful men are following certain methods adapted to their conditions and that the unsuccessful are not. It is the business of the county agents and farm management demonstrators to ascertain what those methods are and to point them out. ** How this can be done is shown by a study of a farm which, for the sake of convenience, can be called the Baldwin farm. The owner’sf labor income one year was minus s4s—his income was $45 less than the interest on his farm and equipment. That year ihe average labor income on 193 farms in the same community was $l9O and jor the 25 more successful farms $750. There were however, other differences whijsh did account for it* Baldwin had 51 acres in crops, as compared with an average of 68 and for the best farms 93. He fed practically all his crops to his 11 cows and 2 horses, but the receipts from butter and milk from each of his cows 1 * averaged only S3O. On the average farm there were 6 cows, giving average receipts of $44, and on best farms eight cows, with average receipts from .each of $62. The other farmers with their larger crop acreage had a surplus of crops to sell. Baldwin, With as good yields as the others per acre, had practically nothing to sell, and the stock to which he fed his crops was too poor to give him profitable returns. .. The important thing for Baldwin, said the demonstrators when they had scertained these facts was to weed out his herd, to keep a record of the production of each cow and to get rid of those which were costing him money. The next thing was if possible to rent or buy a little more land so that the size of his business would be more commensurate with its equipment. He and his horses were capable of farming as much land as his neighbors, and by not doing it he was wasting his time just as his cows were wasting his- feed: Such demonstrations of course, arevaluable only for the community in which they are made. They cannot be taken to mean that it is better to keep 8 cows than 11, to sell crops than to feed them, or to cultivate 90 acres than 50. They show, however, that there aj§,ja v lways profitable and unprofitable ways of running a farm in any community, and that if a man s is losing money in return for hard work It will pay him to learn from his neighbors who are making it. It is in helping him to do this that the county agents are now finding one of their niQjjt useful functions,