Some Observations on the So-Called Agricultural Ladder

Abstract

Much has been said and written in recent years on the feasibility of an average individual starting empty-handed and achieving, during his working life, the full ownership of an average American farm. The so-called agricultural ladder is the different tenure stages which such an average individual passes through, or over, on his way up to full ownership of a farm. If this individual lives with a farmer father and works for him as a non-wage earner through most of all of his teen years, then becomes a hired man either to his father or to some other farmer, then a tenant farmer, and then an encumbered farm owner, or an unencumbered farm owner, he is said to have climbed the agricultural ladder without skipping any of the stages or rungs on that ladder.2 It is the purpose of the writer, in this paper, to call attention to what seem to him to be some of the unwarranted conclusions and inferences in the writings and the researches of students on rural problems, particularly as these writings and researches pertain to this so-called agricultural ladder and farmers' relations to it.