"BACK TO THE FARM! " 153 



Let me repeat what I have said elsewhere in this 

 book and give a bill of particulars. I am a fairly good 

 farmer, born and bred on a farm, and I direct (un- 

 fortunately in absentia most of the time) a reasonably 

 good farm. My tenant sold wheat of the crop of last 

 summer as low as eighty-four cents a bushel within one 

 hundred miles of Baltimore, which is a great wheat 

 market. The cost of transportation to Baltimore is a 

 little over six cents a bushel, so that the price in Balti- 

 more at the time was ninety cents. This wheat was 

 grown on land fertilized with so-called commercial fer- 

 tilizer, and a careful record of all the expenditures, with 

 all reasonable charges against the land, interest on the 

 investment, taxes, etc., left only a very small profit. 



Again, I bought stock cattle the last of November, 

 1910, at $46.50 a head. I kept them for about a year, 

 and sold them for $61.00 a head. If I allow only five 

 cents a day for the feed and care of these animals, I come 

 out of the transaction with a loss of more than three 

 dollars a head. These fat cattle weighed almost exactly 

 1200 pounds, and were sold at the railway station three 

 miles from the farm at the rate of $5.30 per hundred- 

 weight. If I, after long experience of practical farm- 

 ing and long study of scientific farming, am scarcely 

 able, or not able, to make farming pay one hundred 

 miles from Baltimore and only sixty miles from Wash- 

 ington, are others likely to succeed better ? Yes, I may 

 answer, if those others spend their days upon the farm, 

 take part in its labors, and personally direct all of its 

 affairs. 



These are not theoretical conjectures, but figures 

 from actual experience. A like bill of particulars could 

 be given for every article grown on the farm, where 

 labor is all paid for and a correct account kept of all 



