These conditions offer a reward to those agricultural enter prisers who can purchase lands at a price based upon the high costs and lower yields of the older methods and cultivate them at the lower costs and with the larger yields of the newer methods. This movement, therefore, toward the consolida tion of smaller into larger farms is likely to continue in many communities for several decades. This is likewise an ad vantage to the community in increasing the production with less labor. But the net effect upon the social life of the countryside is more doubtful, and calls for careful consider ation.
§ 3. Self-sufficing versus commercial farming. The typi cal American farming family once produced nearly every thing it used, and used nearly everything it produced. It was very nearly a self-sufficing economic unit, a "closed economy," as it is sometimes called. Food, clothing, fuel, lumber, houses, furniture, tools, were on the farm carried through the various processes from the first gathering of the raw materials to the finished product. They were then con sumed by the farm household. It is true that even in the first settlements there were some craftsmen—cobblers, millers, weavers, blacksmiths—whose services and wares were got by trading some of the surplus products from the farms—butter, cheese, eggs, wool, hides, furs, live stock, grain, lumber. A few rare commodities of foreign make found their way to the farm through peddlers and merchants ; but altogether the goods produced outside the farm were a small fraction of the family's consumption, and were exchanged for but little of the farm's production. Most farmers tried to produce for them selves, as far as possible, everything their families needed, even when the soil and situation were poorly suited to the purposes. True, there were early some exceptional cases in which only one kind of product was taken from the land. Such were the forest products of masts, shingles, lum ber, and turpentine, and the great southern staple, tobacco, and later cotton. The exceptions have been tending to become the rule in more and more communities. Farmers have been specializing more and more in the kinds of prod ucts to which their farms are adapted in respect to soil, rela tion to market, and otherwise. These products are taken to market and sold for money with which are bought the things needed for use on the farm.
§ 4. Farming viewed as a capitalistic enterprise. Thus Fig. 3, Chapter 27.—Production of wheat.
Nom: Largely produced in a comparatively restricted wheat belt bordering tie semi-arid region; elsewhere mainly a rotation crop.
the farm comes to be looked upon more and more, not merely as a home, hut much as if it were a commercial enterprise or a factory, by which products are made for sale. This change, to be sure, is far from complete, as the figures for the average farmer's income show that a large share of the family living still comes from the farm. It has gone on much further in
some districts than in others, as is indicated in the types of farming discussed below. But, just to the extent that the farmer grows crops to sell, his outlook on his work undergoes a change. He is less exclusively a farmer, concerned with the technical processes of farming; he must be more largely a business man. Like a manufacturing enterpriser, he buys the factors of production, combines them into new products, and sells them again. He becomes interested in market con ditions and prices. He grows more commercially minded. He views the farm no longer as a fixed area, but one that may be enlarged by purchase or by rental, and that may be reduced by selling or letting the less needed parts. One fifth of farm owners now rent additional land. In commercial farming the land is not contrasted with capital as something apart, consist ing of the value of the equipment and stock; but the whole complex of land and other goods is thought of as a capital investment. The greater ease of tranferring landed property in America and the greater mobility of our population have always made it more natural here than in Europe to look upon land as a capital investment. This view is now becom ing more general as a result of the commercializing of farming enterprise.
This change has been favored by other influences. Partic ularly has the use of machinery and of other equipment, calling for a larger investment per man and per acre, been making agriculture, in its form of enterprise, more like manu facturing and commercial undertakings.