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Should a farmer invest in new buildings and machinery, or spend more on feed, fuel, repairs, and supplies? Gerhard Tintner and O. H. Brownlee bring this practical allocation problem to production-function analysis using 1939 records from 468 Iowa farms. Their estimates suggest that these farms were, on average, over-improved: additional operating expenditure and productive assets promised greater marginal returns than further improvements. The interest lies as much in how they reach that judgement as in the recommendation itself. Translating accounts into inputs exposes unmeasured differences in land and labor and, crucially, the absence of any satisfactory measure of management. Readers can see how elasticities become investment comparisons—and why findings from unusually prosperous farms in a single year cannot become general rules for Iowa agriculture.
A corrected table can change how farm inputs appear to contribute to production. In this brief notice, Gerhard Tintner and O. H. Brownlee acknowledge computational errors identified by W. O. Jones and replace Table 3 of their 1944 study. Their revised estimates put labor’s marginal productivity per dollar at 1.9555 for hog farms but 0.0361 for dairy farms; the accompanying five-percent fiducial limits distinguish positive estimates from those whose uncertainty spans zero. For readers using the earlier article, this is an essential numerical amendment—not a new model or an explanation of the errors—and a compact source for comparing estimated productivity across farming categories.