Norwich bulletin., 1910-02-19

| Icas Good seed costs me about $3 a bushel; his must have been worth at least as much. I was never able to plant tan acre in rows, as he did, eight to ten inches apart in the row, with as little as half a bushel of seed. Allowing that he did. however. his seed cost him $15O At five cents a bushel for husking the crop this latter work would have cost him $11-33- At two cents bushel for shelling-the price charged with me-the cost of that op- eration would have been $4.53. These three items aggregate s17-36, which, added to the manure and fertilizer, makes $132.41, leaving $6.61 to pay for nine days work of man and team and three days work of man without team He was certainly very lucky to get | that amount of labor for that sum. It would have cost me over $40. Nor does he make any account of the cost of the previous years work of prepa- ration in the raising of that pea crop, nor of the time he himself spent in planning and supervising the work. nor the cost of getting his corn to market, nor of the interest on the value of the land, nor Of the taxes it had to pay,
 nor of possible-with me absolutely certain-costs of fighting crows and WoodchuckS and 'cOons and cut-Worn1S and fencing to keep out the neighbors'
 stock In other words, the North Car olina corn grower has either forgotten a whole lot of expenses which l should have to bear, or else he was phenOme-
 naIly lucky in being able to get along
 without them. l find that, adding to
 the items of cost he confesses to and which I can trace, the omitted items which I can see I should have to pay for exactly similar work on a similar
 crop, and the extra cost of fertilizers to me over what he paid, the cost to me would have been for the acre at
 least $21S And the crop of 226 23
 bushels would have been worth to me, at the price at which corn was selling
 here last fall just $153.68, or aboufS65
 less than it had cost
 Now, don't call that farming. It's
 just building a brag- It's the price
 man pays for the opportunity to
 strut around with chip on his shoul-
 der. and say: T told you I'd show
 you. and I havel" If one enjoys that
 sort of cooke a. doodle doo-ing enough
 to pay the price, he can buy it almost
 any time. But I object to having
 such things set forth as examples of
 model farming; as exemplifications
 of modern methods; as copies for
 all farmers to initiate and results for
 all farmers to achieve. Why. there
 isn't an acre in my truck patch the
 crop-production of which can't dou-
 ble this very next season-if am will
 ing to spend enough on it. But I'm
 not in the garden sass" business for
 the fun of it, nor for the sake of being I'm in it for profit, and that's what most farmers are farming for-or try ing to.
 If can raise a crop worth $1oO an acre by spending for fertilizer, labor and in all other ways s75, I make S25 for myself and add it to my surplus. I know perfectly well that can raise $200 worth of that same crop on that same acre-if l will spend about $225 in labor and fertilizer and other things. Then should have to hunt that surplus for $25 to make good my loss. Which would be neither farming nor playing ball, but just simple dam
 Once wanted to see what could do with potatoes. So took a small strip of selected soil, fertiliZed it and culti- vated it and fussed with it in a way that disgusted my practical old dad, and dug a crop which yielded "at the rate of' over seven hundred bushels to the acre. That is, if there had been an acre of it, which there wasn't, and it had all yielded as well, there would have been over seven hundred bushels. don't know how much 1t cost me in labor and other ways; wasn't curious about that matter, just then simply wanted to see what I could do if I let myself loose on my old. worn out ground. 1 have never yet been able to produce one-half that yield per acre, in a sizeable potato field treated in a practical way with regard to profit from the crop That's where the falIacy comes in with a great many of the experimental crops we read about, grown in test plats. What can be done on a fftfeth of an acre, in a se- lected field, with special cultivation and care, can't always nor often be done on fifty acres, nor on five, as we work ing farmers must handle them. Fur thermore, I very much doubt if these marvellous yields we are told about so often are the usual thing. even with those who tell of them. They are the oxrr ha nh ions coming in some specially favorable season, and so unusual that they at tract notice and cause talk. It's just the same with comets; they are not regular appearances, nightly visitants of the skies. Therefore we notice them and talk about them, and the papers print descriptions and the as- tronomers spend long nights studying them. For one, I'm glad that the sun isn't a comet, that it hasn't a tail nine ty million miles long and that it is due this way oftener than once in seventy eight years or so. I like to read about casiona1ly-and once I got up at 2 o'clock in the morning to look at one But for a steady course of reading they would become a. bit cIoy- ing, and I really prefer to know what I can about the sun and the moon and our few sister planets, which are con- ventfonally regular in their appear ances and movements, and which WE can, consequently, depend on, more or less
 When some farmer makes a continu- ing success of farming; comes out ahead of the game year after year; does a good, steady. improving busi- ness decade after decade. then I'm in- terested I want to know how he works and plans and fingers" But don't get much nor do believe there is much for anyone to get from these m neteoric explorations of exceptional successes which are Skyrocketed up over us at various times from different parts of the country.
 THE FARMER.
 LETTERS Tn THE FnIT0R