144 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



Cattle eat it very greedily, and it is second only to oats and peas 

 as a milk producer. 



In order to find out what it cost to run our farm and keep our 

 cows, we kept account one year, charging our own time at what 

 it cost to hire the help we hired when they boarded themselves. 



One man one year $300 00 



One man six months 163 00 



Boy one year 100 00 



Extra help at harvesting 50 00 



Interest on farm 140 00 



Taxes no 00 



Insurance 17 00 



Interest on money invested in farm imple- 

 ments, and wear and tear of same 50 00 



Interest on, and depreciation in, farm horses 40 00 



Fertilizers 100 00 



Feed for farm horses 45 00 



Grass seed 20 00 



Seed peas 10 00 



Total $1,145 °° 



Deducting $500 received from the factory for sweet corn, 

 would leave $645. This divided by forty-three, the number of 

 full grown cows that our herd would average, would make the 

 entire cost for the coarse fodder and care and making and mar- 

 keting the butter, just fifteen dollars per head. They had ten 

 dollars worth of provender per head, making the total cost of 

 keeping, twenty-five dollars per head. If there had been no corn 

 factory, and we had planted a large growing yellow corn, we 

 should have saved about fifty dollars in picking and hauling to 

 the factory, and got about thirty tons more of silage, worth 

 seventy-five dollars, and about 200 bushels of corn worth approx- 

 imately $125, and should not have bought quite as much proven- 

 der, and the total cost would probably have been about twenty- 

 eight dollars per head. 



How has this been done ? First, by keeping a very large part 

 of the farm under cultivation, making use of more of nature's 

 fertility, of which she has enough in store for generations yet 

 unborn, and securing against winter-killing ; for a crop put in 

 in spring and harvested in fall does not have much chance to 



