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CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION SERVICE [Circ. 18 
LOCAL PROGRESS 
The question now is, what are you going to do to help make 
farming pay better? 
It has been pointed out that some of the problems can probably 
not be solved. Some men are located on bad land on which the yields 
are always low. Such land never makes a profit except in a year of 
high prices. Men thereon are out of luck. We know no cheap way 
by which bad land can be made into good land. Farmers on such 
land will probably always be the poor people of the locality. 
Some men have too little land ; small tracts have been taken up, 
and except in a time of very high prices, or on those few acreages 
where very high yields can be made, there isn’t enough gross income, 
let alone net income, to make a good living for a family. These men 
are under-capitalized. They haven't a big enough business. In some 
cases about the only thing that can be done is to unite two or more 
little farms into one larger unit. Somebody may have to move off 
and go to town, take a job and let the remaining farmers farm the 
land. 
The trouble with other farmers is that their expenses are too high. 
They produce at too high eosts. Everything is expensively done 
instead of economically. These farms need to be studied to see how 
the leaks ean be stopped, how labor can be used to better advantage 
and where improved methods may be used. 
On many farms the yields per acre are low because the men don’t 
ase the best methods. This makes the cost per ton high. Many of 
our farmers can get larger returns by increasing the yield per acre. 
One of the ways to cut down the cost is to get larger returns per acre; 
more tons of peaches, more pounds of butterfat per cow, more dozens 
of eggs per hen. 
On some farms the quality is low; everything that is produced is 
second rate. In general, California farmers cannot afford to produce 
second rate products. Most of our markets are three thousand or more 
miles away. We have to pay the same freight whether the quality 
is good or whether it is poor. We cannot afford to ship stuff across 
che continent unless it is the best that can be grown. 
In many eases our marketing methods have been bad. We have 
been trying to improve these through our cooperative marketing 
associations and every support should be given to these associations 
because they are more likely, in general, to give better returns than