hat is
enough.

CHAPTER XXX

AUTUMN RECKONING

We harvested the crops in the autumn of 1896, and were thankful for the
bountiful yield. Nearly sixteen hundred bushels of oats and twenty-seven
hundred bushels of corn made a proud showing in the granary, when added
to its previous stock. The corn fodder, shredded by our own men and
machine, made the great forage barn look like an overflowing cornucopia,
and the only extra expense attending the harvest was $31 paid for
threshing the oats.

Three important items of food are consumed on the farm that have to be
purchased each year, and as there is not much fluctuation in the price
paid, we may as well settle the per capita rate for the milch cows and
hogs for once and all. At each year's end we can then easily find the
cash outlay for the herds by multiplying the number of stock by the cost
of keeping one.

My Holstein cows consume a trifle less than three tons of grain each per
year,--about fifteen pounds a day. Taking the ration for four cows as a
matter of convenience, we have: corn and cob meal, three tons, and
oatmeal, three tons, both kinds raised and ground on the farm, and not
charged in this account; wheat bran, three tons at $18, $54; gluten
meal, two tons at $24, $48; oil meal, one ton, $26; total cash outlay
for four cows, $128, or $32 per head. This estimate is, however, about
$2 too liberal. We will, hereafter, charge each milch cow $30, and will
also charge each hog fattened on the place $1 for shorts and middlings
consumed. This is not exact, but it is near enough, and it greatly
simplifies accounts.

As I kept twenty-six cows ten months, and ten more for an average of
four and a half months, the feeding for 1896 would be equivalent to one
year for thirty cows, or $900. To this add $120 for swine food and $25
for grits and oyster shells for the chickens, and we have $1045 paid for
food for stock. Shoeing the horses for the year and repairs to machinery
cost $157. The purchased food for eight employees for twelve months and
for two additional ones for eight months, amounted to $734. The wage
account, including $50 extra to Thompson, was $2358.

A second hen-house, a duplicate of the first, was built before October.
It was intended that each house should accommodate four hundred laying
hens. We have now on the place five of these houses; but only two of
them, besides the incubator and the brooder-house, were built in 1896.
As offset to the hea