Efficiency of Labor

Excerpts: Today a farmer with mechanical and electrical power, modern machines, improved seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, convenient buildings, and improved breeding stock and feed turns out almost four times as much product each hour of work as a farmer did each hour in the years just before the First World War. Advances in efficiency of farm labor have resulted directly from fewer hours of farmwork and from greater farm production. Many related and interrelated forces, including engineering and biological developments and economic and social changes, have been behind these basic causes. During the half century since 1910, farm output per man-hour has risen at an average rate of almost 3 percent a year. This gain has not come about gradually.