GENERAL FARM MANAGEMENT. 27 



must have a driver it will necessitate keeping a hired hand for 

 say eight months of the year, and at fifteen dollars a month 

 this would be one hundred and twenty dollars per annum, or 

 twelve hundred dollars for the ten years. Then, both horses 

 and hand must be fed, and counting that it costs one dollar a 

 week to keep a horse, the bill for the team will be one hundred 

 and four dollars a year, or one thousand and forty dollars more. 

 The board of the hand at the moderate rate of two dollars per 

 week would make seventy dollars a year additional, and this 

 gives us seven hundred dollars. We will offset what the old 

 horses and harness would be worth at the end of the ten years 

 against extra plows, horseshoeing, and repairs to farm imple- 

 ments, and as the teams would be pretty well worn out this 

 seems to me to be a liberal price for them. Now we will bring 

 these items together, and see what they foot up. 



First cost of team and harness, .... $300 00 



Keep of team for ten years, ...... 1,040 00 



Hired man, eight months a year for ten years, . . 1,200 00 



Board of hired man, ....... 700 00 



Total ' . . . $3,240 00 



The above sum can, I think, be fairly charged as the expense 

 involved by keeping the extra team, and the question to be de- 

 cided is, Has this expenditure brought a corresponding increase 

 of income? I think it safe to say in nine cases out of ten it 

 has not. The fact of having the two teams and keeping the 

 extra hired man has been a continual temptation to plow too 

 much land, and the consequence has been exhaustion of the soil, 

 decreased yield per acre, and more frequent failure of crops. 



Now, let us look at the management of the other farmer, who 

 has learned that bushels, not acres, is the thing to be sought. 

 He starts with a single team, and plows from thirty to forty 

 acres a year. This enables him to practice a rotation, so that 

 he has a breadth of clover sod to plow each year. He can also 

 keep more stock and save more barnyard manure. While his 

 neighbor's farm is necessarily growing less productive his is 

 increasing its yield. His wheat, on a rich soil, resists frost, fly, 

 and chinch-bug, and makes a crop when his neighbor's fails, and 



