get many times the price that his
pedestrian neighbor gets. It is much easier to grow 200,000 lb. of
feed on one acre than to grow them on ten acres.

To cultivate is to watch the soil as you would watch your cooking
and to tend the crop as you would tend your animals. The crop is as
alive as the stock and as easily gets sick.

If an ordinary farmer rents 60 acres at $5.00 per acre, a moderate
rent for good land, he pays out in cash $300, besides farm wages. If
he buys it, his interest and taxes will amount to nearly as much;
but if he tills but five acres intelligently, he can get as much out
of it as out of an ordinary farm, and even if his rent be as high as
$30 per acre for well situated land, he is $150 to the good;
besides, doing the work himself, he has no drain of capital for
wages.

Large barns and shelter for help being unnecessary, he can live in a
cheap shack till he accumulates enough for proper buildings. Many of
the successful vacant lot farmers live in a tent or in shanties made
of old boxes and such like.

Of course, if we have the knowledge and ability and the capital and
can give it the attention, it is more profitable to cultivate on a
large scale than on a small one, because in that case each worker
necessarily produces more than he gets as wages--and we pocket the
difference.

Most American farmers are holding land that somebody ought to pay
them a bonus for working, else they must come out of the little end
of the horn. They get poor or poorly situated land, because it costs
less, and then put three or four hundred dollars' worth of labor and
money a year into the land and take out four or five hundred
dollars' worth of crops.

The farmer thinks he must have big fields to feed his cattle, and
that he must have cattle to keep the big fields fertilized, so he
raises hay.

In that he makes two mistakes; hay, like most other low-priced
crops, is risky--the cost of harvesting is high and the margin of
profit small. A week of wet weather at cutting time or the
impossibility of getting enough men and machines in the week when it
should be cut, may make a loss.

But the scientific dairy man does not take that risk, nor let his
cattle use up this fodder by wandering over the fields in search of
tid-bits of grass or clover, or, goaded by the flies, trampling more
grass than they eat and wasting their manure.

He keeps the cows in cool sheds, feeds them on cut fodder, and saves
every ounce of