Finger Lakes history · industry
Two Weeks of Farm Labor in Yates County
A federal census captured sharply different hired-labor snapshots in late September 1939 and late March 1940—but it was not a year-round workforce count.
A single row in the 1940 United States Census of Agriculture offers two very different snapshots of hired farm work in Yates County.
For the week of September 24–30, 1939, the table recorded 639 farms reporting hired labor and 1,228 hired persons. For the week of March 24–30, 1940, it recorded 276 farms and 461 hired persons.
Those figures are revealing, but only if the table's boundaries travel with them. The measure covered people age fourteen and older who worked the equivalent of at least two days during the specified week. It excluded housework and contract construction. The census also separated workers hired by the month, by the day or week, and through other arrangements that included piece work and contract labor.
The comparison is not an annual employment total. It does not identify the workers, show how long each person stayed, measure every kind of unpaid family or household labor, or explain which crop or employer created the work. It compares two particular weeks under one table's stated definitions.
That narrowness is the point. A farm workforce can look radically different depending on when an enumerator takes the snapshot. The late-September count was substantially larger than the late-March count, but the table alone cannot turn that contrast into a complete story of wages, working conditions, migration, gender, or long-term change.
The geography matters too. Yates County includes communities and farmland connected to Keuka Lake, but a county total is not a lake-shore, town, farm, or household statistic. Reconstructing the people behind these numbers will require payrolls, farm records, directories, newspapers, census schedules that survive, and oral histories—not a line drawn from one county row to the lake.
Source note
The figures and definitions come from the United States Census of Agriculture, 1940 New York County Table X, printed page 272, Yates County column, lines 14–29. The table compares farm labor for March 24–30, 1940 with September 24–30, 1939 and defines its measured population in the heading above lines 6–29.
Later census editions use their own categories, reference periods, farm universes, and sampling notes. They remain valuable private research sources, but this draft deliberately does not combine them into a public trend line.