Responsibility of The Manager
Managers are responsible for success in farming. Upon their experience and ability depends the securing of the “greatest continuous profit,” and, in fact, the securing, in many cases, of any profit at all. They direct, plan, and systemize the regular farm duties.
The manager must arrange an advantageous distribution of farm labor, keep in intimate touch with all the farm work, know how to do it and be able to judge when it is well done, know what reasonably to expect of his men, know how to direct labor so as to meet adequately each season’s demand and so as to provide employment at all times.
The manager must study the efficiency of different classes of workers. Too often farm profits are thought to depend upon small wages rather than upon experience and ability. The good manager will not make this mistake. The old belief that anyone can farm has been abandoned. Almost anyone can learn to farm, but the losses by the inexperience of an apprentice must be carefully avoided. Many a prospect of a full crop of corn as evidenced by the regularity of “stand in the row” has been reduced to a three-fourths return by an inexperienced plowboy plowing the young plants out or leaving them covered. An experienced plowman with an improved cultivator would have made a profit possible where the inexperienced hand caused a loss. The better worker is worthy his hire and better wages. The demand is growing in farming as in other industries for trained workers. The yields that the farm manager is able to secure are dependent so largely on his knowledge of labor and ability to direct it, that particular study should be given the labor problem of the farm by anyone preparing to assume the responsibilities of farm management.
Farm work is not accomplished by separate groups of workers so much as by the same group of workers being employed in the appropriate undertakings at different seasons, as the manager directs.
The competition for satisfactory farm labor has become so keen that far-sighted managers pay special attention to the conditions under which their laborers, as well as their skilled hands, live. A little money judiciously expended in providing buildings that are livable and homelike, a little liberality in the matter of time, a chance to garden, to keep a cow or a few hens, or to do some of the many other things that serve to keep satisfactory labor, may return a profit far out of proportion to the expense represented. In other words, the farm manager must profit by the experience of the manufacturer and avoid excessive “labor turn over.”