FORAGE CROPS IN NEW ENGLAND. 171 



Mr. Cheever. I do not know. The farm is my home. I 

 think considerable of it. Those improvements were our knit- 

 ting-work. We need a certain amount of help to do our 

 regular farm-work ; and there are some leisure days and odd 

 hours, and days when some farmers would go to the store to 

 smoke, and talk politics, when we have been doing that job. 

 Looking at it in that light, it has not been ver}^ expensive. 



Mr. Shaw. Suppose you had not such 'convenient mead- 

 ows to put your stones in, what would you do with them ? 



Mr. Cheever. If land needs underdraining, a great many 

 can be used to build drains. I think stones can often be put 

 in drains better than anywhere else ; and it is a profitable 

 way to dispose of them. 



Mr. Shaw. Suppose your farm does not need draining? 



Mr. Cheever. Generally you do not have many stones 

 on farms which do not need draining. On light, sandy land, 

 stones are not often abundant. 



Mr. Gushing. I have been deeply interested in the paper 

 which has been read. I would like to know if Mr. Cheever 

 has kept books, so that he can tell us any thing of the 

 relative cost of keeping a cow on a farm like mine, where it 

 now takes about three or four acres to keep a cow, instead 

 of one, as he has told us, — whether it would be a matter of 

 economy for me to throw out to common seventy-five acres, 

 and try to keep my cows on twenty-five acres. I believe my 

 brother milk-producers in Plymouth County would share my 

 interest in that question. 



Mr. Cheever. I have no hesitation in saying that good 

 farming pays better than poor. If you want to make the 

 most money from every thing, and make your milk in the 

 cheapest way, I believe that the method I have spoken of 

 this afternoon, gradually adopted, — gradually enough to 

 understand it, and become acquainted with it, — will bring 

 the cost of your milk at a lower figure and with more profit 

 than you can get it by depending upon pastures in the old 

 way, feeding mowings, and following along in the old New- 

 England methods of the past. That is my conviction. 



Question. Will you give these gentlemen some idea of 

 the expense of running your farm ? 



Mr. Cheever. That is a difficult thing for me to do. I 

 have employed this season two men constantly, and have not 



