ulture. There is a great
variation in the working efficiency of men employed in farming. In a
certain locality there were twenty-one days of rain in the thirty-one
days of May. The next year between June 5 and September 5 in the same
locality there was not half an inch of rainfall at any one time.

What is true of labor is also true of machinery. The farmer must
purchase machinery which he can use only a few days in the year, while
the manufacturer, for the most part, employs his machinery continuously,
sometimes day and night. While natural causes prevent the farmer from
using the same business methods, or from being able to calculate his
profits with the same precision as is possible by those following
manufacturing and mercantile pursuits, it is nevertheless important that
farming should be planned to avoid, as far as possible, the influence of
natural causes. Certain kinds of farming are less dependent upon natural
causes than others. Wisdom and foresight can do much to avoid, in all
farming, untoward influences. The clever farmer seldom complains about
the weather.

Farm machinery has made unnecessary, and hence unprofitable, some of
the labor at which children were formerly employed. In the not distant
past many, perhaps most farmers, owed their prosperity in large
measure to the labor of their children. A large family, especially of
boys, was a valuable asset. Even a generation ago conditions were not
far different, and two generations ago were quite the same as those
described by Homer:

"Another field rose high with waving grain:
With bended sickles stand the reaper train:
Here, stretch'd in ranks, the level'd swaths are found;
Sheaves heaped on sheaves here thicken up the ground.
With sweeping stroke the mowers strow the lands;
The gath'rers follow, and collect in bands:
And last the children, in whose arms are borne
(Too short to gripe them) the brown sheaves of corn.
The rustic monarch of the field descries,
With silent glee, the heaps around him rise.
A ready banquet on the turf is laid
Beneath an ample oak's expanded shade.
The victim ox the sturdy youth prepare:
The reapers due repast, the women's care."

There is also another reason why the age of the employed has been
raised. It is due to the growth of higher education. Where formerly
the farmer's children between the ages of twelve and twenty-one di