The practice of record keeping on French farms and the forms taken by farm records have not been widely studied. If[i] livres de raison[/i] have attracted some recent discussion, little interest has been shown in the day-to-day writings contained in[i] agendas[/i] (diaries). This article shows that persistent efforts were made throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to introduce onto farms accounting management tools and the media needed to keep records. The movement provided an organised body of resources: their use was advocated by authority figures such as[i] agromanes[/i], schoolmasters and agricultural masters.