To sow one acre more

"No one doubts that children supplied valuable labor on nineteenth-century American farms. But the value of that labor varied, and the children themselves represented economic costs as well as benefits. How did children affect a farmer's choices? Did bigger farms mean, in effect, bigger families? Drawing on census, wage, and other data, Lee A. Craig addresses such questions in offering a new econometric interpretation of productivity and fertility in the antebellum North." "In contrast to prevailing scholarly opinion, Craig finds that children did not provide a noteworthy advantage on the frontier, though they did so in the settled but rocky-soiled Northeast. He concludes that a farmer's economic strategy depended not so much on the size of his holding or his age (and fertility) as it did on regional agricultural patterns and proximity to market. These findings contradict the now-dominant view that farmers adjusted output according to the number of available laborers - including children. Distinguishing between the Northeast and Old Northwest, Craig constructs a model that incorporates the advantages and monetary disadvantages of child labor and accounts for the drop in fertility in regions where opportunities for children off the farm were greater than those at home."--BOOK JACKET.