DAIKY FARMING. 19 



know what freight cliarges you iiKiy have to pay in tliis section to 

 get your produc-ts to Boston. I am located thirty miles from the 

 citv and i)ay about two dollars i)cr ton on freights carried over the 

 railroad in either direction. If yon have to pay at the same rate 

 l)er miU' it must cost yon at least twenty-live dollars per ton to get 

 your products landed in the city. That Would be al)out seventy-five 

 cents per bushel for potatoes, and if they were worth a dollar or a 

 dollar and a (jnarter per bushel, as they have been during the past 

 winter, you perhai)S might atford to ship them ; but if the price runs 

 as low as it often does in favorable seasons your potatoes would not 

 pay for shipping. If potatoes bring but seventy-five cents on the 

 cars delivered in Boston, they can be worth nothing here unless you 

 are favored above us in shipping rates. But supposing you send us 

 butter at the same rate of transi)ortation. It would be twenty-five 

 dollars per ton, the same as for potatoes ; but instead of selling it 

 at a cent and a quarter per pound, just the cost of freight, you may 

 certainly calculate on getting not less than fifteen to twenty cents 

 per pound, and often considerable more than that, provided the 

 quality is good. In seasons of low prices your potatoes are practi- 

 cally shut out from our markets unless you are specially favored by 

 transportation companies, while your butter can never be shut out, 

 simply because the difference in the cost of freight on a ton, or on 

 a pound of butter carried from northern Maine, four hundred miles, 

 or from western Masssachusetts, one hundred miles, is so ver}- 

 small that it is scarcely felt. To carry a ton of potatoes to market 

 may require another ton in payment of freight, while a ton of butter 

 may pay the freight charges upon ten, fifteen or twenty tons. 



The farmers of the West understand this matter of freight charges 

 and have been laying their plans accordingly. They formerly sent 

 corn to us here at the East and paid two bushels for bringing one, 

 getting perhaps only ten or twelve cents per bushel at home for the 

 products of their coi-n-fields. Lately they have learned to feed 

 their corn, to concentrate it, "boil it down," as it were, into beef, 

 pork and lard, and now they are reducing it to still greater value, 

 in the form of butter, and they are feeling very happy about it, too, 

 more so than are the dairy farmers of the older States who are thus 

 brought anew into close competition with the cheap virgin soils of 

 the prairies. 



The subject of dairying is one that might well occupy the atten- 

 tion of a meeting like this, not for a day only but for a week. 



