PRICE OF LABOR. 177 



Mr. Ware. From ten to fifteen hundred bushels, I should 

 say, is a fair, good crop of carrots. 



Mr. Perkins. Can you tell us what it costs for labor to raise 

 a bushel of carrots, beets, turnips and potatoes ? 



Mr. Ware. I cannot answer that question, from the fact of 

 our business being so mixed. We have various crops of roots, 

 and perhaps the hands would be occupied half a day in weeding 

 one kind, and part of the day in weeding another, and so on. 

 And perhaps if the men had an hour or two to spare, when they 

 were about something else, they would be set to truckle-hoeing. 

 The business of market gardening is so mixed up, generally, 

 that unless a person made a specialty of it, it would be very 

 difficult for him to tell the exact cost of the production of any 

 one crop. 



Mr. Slade. Can you tell us the price of labor, and the num- 

 ber of hours the laborers work a day ? 



Mr. Ware. This last year, we paid $20 a month for eight 

 months, and boarded the men. The men rise in the morning 

 about five o'clock, do up what we call the chores about the 

 barn, take care of the cattle, eat their breakfast, and go to their 

 work ; at nine o'clock, come in to luncheon ; at twelve, to 

 dinner, and then they have some other chores, and leave off 

 work at night so as to get through with their chores and every- 

 thing about sundown ; before sundown, in the longest days. 

 In the winter, of course, the hours of labor are very much less. 

 In a vegetable garden, perhaps the largest amount of labor is 

 the weeding. We usually hire men enough to do all the spring 

 work, put in the crops, and do the hoeing, and hire boys by the 

 day, to do the weeding. A boy twelve years old, who is used 

 to it, can weed full as much in a day as a man, and perhaps to 

 better advantage ; and we employ a good deal of such labor, 

 and pay them pretty good prices, too. We pay boys seventy- 

 five cents a day, and they don't go to work so early nor work 

 quite so late as the men do. We used to pay boys twenty-five 

 cents a day, where we now pay seventy-five. 



Mr. Clement. Are you ever troubled with the cut-worm 

 among your vegetables ? 



Mr. Ware. The cut-worm is troublesome, but very seldom 

 sufficiently so to destroy a crop, and if we meet with any acci- 

 dent of that kind, we fill up the vacant space, by setting out 

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