Farm Management

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

the problem of economics in agricultural production, with the object of introducing therein the same business efficiency which has brought American manufacturing to its present high degree of perfection. While the basis of manufacturing industry has been radically changed by the use of machinery and factory organization, thus becoming the subject of executive management, agricultural production has not undergone any such basic changes. Farming is still a one-man enterprise and is still largely carried on in the same way in which it was carried on when the handicrafts system of manufacturing obtained. It has been only partially affected by machinery, and that in only certain phases, as in the production of the grain crops, which are now harvested by machinery. Farming, therefore, still remains very much a home industry. The rapid growth of the urban population, and its demands for farm-grown products, have made improved methods in agricultural production a national probthis reason the Federal Departlem. For For ment of Agriculture and the various State agricultural departments have made efficiency in agricultural production one of their chief aims. Minnesota, through its agricultural experiment station, in 1902, was the first State to raise the problem of farm of a special management to the dignity ty scientific study. Shortly after this subject also received the serious consideration of the Federal Department of Agriculture. Now it has been taken up by most of the other States, and every effort is made, through literature and practical to propagate among the demonstrations, onstrations, of the results obfarmers a knowledge dge tained from the experiments made by the demonstration farms established in all parts of the country. Farm management involves many phases of practical farming; the proper rotation of crops, the comparative value of fertilizers; co-operative organization for the purpose of purchasing seeds and fertilizers, and for the sale of crops at a minimum of loss to profiteering middlemen, and, by no means least, a proper system of bookkeeping, whereby the individual farmer may know his profits and losses on his various transactions, so that the source of loss may be eliminated. All means to making farming profitable to farmers are considered a legitimate part of the general subject of farm management. The economy of gasoline-driven vehicles for carrying produce to market, or of dynamite in digging ditches for drainage, are fair illustrations of phases which are shown by actual demonstration. The main object is to eliminate waste and to introduce a scientific efficiency in every department of agricultural production. A fuller discussion of this subject will be found in "What is Farm M Management?" Bulletin No. 259, issued by the Bureau of Plant Industry, Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C.