Farm Accounting

FARM ACCOUNTING by E. L. CURRIER. Originally published in 1924. PREFACE: Importance of Farm Accounts IT is recognized by students of farm management that one of the most important steps that can now be taken in the advancement of farming is a more general adoption of the practice of keeping farm accounts. An effective study of the problems involved in running a farm is possible only when the student is in possession of a fairly complete set of accounts for this particular farm. The farmer must know not only what crops and what animals are most profitable for his type of farm, but he must know also whether his farming business is so managed that each operation is conducted at a compara tively small cost and whether his various enterprises are pro ducing satisfactory results. Correcting errors in farm man agement such as are revealed by a good set of cost accounts may very easily result in increasing the net yearly income from the farm by several hundred dollars. A progressive farmer in Chautauqua County, New York, reports that the best thing that has happened to him in his experience as a farmer was the imposition of the Federal Income Tax, which compelled him to keep farm accounts, since these enabled him to increase the returns from his farm by several times the amount of the tax. There is no doubt that a few minutes each day certainly less than ten spent in entering the neces sary daily records, and a few days at the end of the year spent in posting the accounts and studying the information they contain would yield the average farmer a much larger return than he now gets for the same amount of time occupied in ordinary farm work. Importance of Farm Accounting as a School Study Every winter a small army of county agents and of exten sion workers from the agricultural colleges are engaged in teaching groups of farmers how to keep accounts. In many cases bankers, whose business depends in part on the prosperity of the farmers, have joined in this-work. It must be confessed that the net results have been meager. The time that a busy farmer can spend learning to keep accounts, even in the comparatively slack winter season, is too short his attention is too fully occupied with his usual work and frequently he has arrived at an age and acquired a state of mind which are not conducive to the learning of a new and fairly complicated subject. This need not cause surprise nor be the occasion for discouragement. An attempt to teach any of the standard subjects now studied in our high schools under such condi tions would certainly meet with no greater success. It would seem fairly safe to conclude that farm accounting can come into general practice only as the result of its adoption as a regular school subject. ....