Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/642

 628 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

cotton and one-third the com being a common arrangement of this character).

Another important change in the farm schedule is designed to enable the Census Bureau as nearly as possible to eliminate dupli- cations in the value of farm products. It is practically useless, in view of the fact that most farmers do not keep accurate book- keeping accounts, to ask the farmer directly what is the total net value of his product for the year. The only practicable way is to ask him the quantity and value of each crop or product which he has raised. The farmer who raises a given number of bushels of corn and tons of hay and feeds them all or in part to his own live stock will, therefore, duplicate in so far the value of his products, reporting both the value of the corn and hay and the value of the live stock sold or slaughtered. At the census of 1900 the attempt was made to eliminate this duplication in some measure by asking as one question the value of all products of the farm enumerated which had been fed on that farm to ani- mals or poultry. This value was deducted from the sum of the gross values of the several individual products to give the net value. This plan involved the obvious difficulty that the farmer had in most cases no accurate knowledge of the quantity or value of his products which he had fed to his own live stock. Moreover, even this deduction did not give the true net value of the farmer's product, for it took no account of the fact that he might have purchased feed from other farmers for his live stock.

At the present census, in order to permit the elimination of these duplications, we shall ask, in the first place, the amount spent by the farmer for hay, grain, and other produce (not raised on his own farm) for use as feed for domestic animals and poultry, and also the amount spent for the purchase of domestic animals. In the second place, instead of asking directly what products raised by the farmer himself were fed to his live stock and poultry, we shall ask the quantity and value of his sales of products adapted to feed of stock, such as com, oats, hay, and the like, the difference between the quantity sold and the quantity produced, which is also asked, representing substantially the amount consumed on the farm. In the case of those crops, such