My Life and Work | Page 7

the materials the best or merely the most expensive?
Then--can its complexity and weight be cut down? And so on.
There is no more sense in having extra weight in an article than there is
in the cockade on a coachman's hat. In fact, there is not as much. For
the cockade may help the coachman to identify his hat while the extra
weight means only a waste of strength. I cannot imagine where the
delusion that weight means strength came from. It is all well enough in
a pile-driver, but why move a heavy weight if we are not going to hit
anything with it? In transportation why put extra weight in a machine?
Why not add it to the load that the machine is designed to carry? Fat
men cannot run as fast as thin men but we build most of our vehicles as
though dead-weight fat increased speed! A deal of poverty grows out of
the carriage of excess weight. Some day we shall discover how further

to eliminate weight. Take wood, for example. For certain purposes
wood is now the best substance we know, but wood is extremely
wasteful. The wood in a Ford car contains thirty pounds of water. There
must be some way of doing better than that. There must be some
method by which we can gain the same strength and elasticity without
having to lug useless weight. And so through a thousand processes.
The farmer makes too complex an affair out of his daily work. I believe
that the average farmer puts to a really useful purpose only about 5 per
cent of the energy that he spends. If any one ever equipped a factory in
the style, say, the average farm is fitted out, the place would be
cluttered with men. The worst factory in Europe is hardly as bad as the
average farm barn. Power is utilized to the least possible degree. Not
only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to
logical arrangement. A farmer doing his chores will walk up and down
a rickety ladder a dozen times. He will carry water for years instead of
putting in a few lengths of pipe. His whole idea, when there is extra
work to do, is to hire extra men. He thinks of putting money into
improvements as an expense. Farm products at their lowest prices are
dearer than they ought to be. Farm profits at their highest are lower
than they ought to be. It is waste motion--waste effort--that makes farm
prices high and profits low.
On my own farm at Dearborn we do everything by machinery. We have
eliminated a great number of wastes, but we have not as yet touched on
real economy. We have not yet been able to put in five or ten years of
intense night-and-day study to discover what really ought to be done.
We have left more undone than we have done. Yet at no time--no
matter what the value of crops--have we failed to turn a first-class
profit. We are not farmers--we are industrialists on the farm. The
moment the farmer considers himself as an industrialist, with a horror
of waste either in material or in men, then we are going to have farm
products so low-priced that all will have enough to eat, and the profits
will be so satisfactory that farming will be considered as among the
least hazardous and most profitable of occupations.
Lack of knowledge of what is going on and lack of knowledge of what

the job really is and the best way of doing it are the reasons why
farming is thought not to pay. Nothing could pay the way farming is
conducted. The farmer follows luck and his forefathers. He does not
know how economically to produce, and he does not know how to
market. A manufacturer who knew how neither to produce nor to
market would not long stay in business. That the farmer can stay on
shows how wonderfully profitable farming can be.
The way to attain low-priced, high-volume production in the factory or
on the farm--and low-priced, high-volume production means plenty for
everyone--is quite simple. The trouble is that the general tendency is to
complicate very simple affairs. Take, for an instance, an
"improvement."
When we talk about improvements usually we have in mind some
change in a product. An "improved" product is one that has been
changed. That is not my idea. I do not believe in starting to make until I
have discovered the best possible thing. This, of course, does not mean
that a product should never be changed, but I think that it will be found
more economical in the end not even to try to produce an article until
you have fully satisfied yourself