186 BOAED OF AGRICULTURE. 



doing all the work of feeding and milking the cow, cleaning 

 the stables and hauling away the manure is another certain 

 sum. Add together all these items for one day's expense, 

 divide it on each quart of milk produced, and the rate per 

 quart may be above the price it will sell for ; yet, if the 

 farmer raised all that hay and grain, and did all the work of 

 caring for his cow, he may have a balance in his treasury that 

 his figures fail to account for. If that man's arithmetic were 

 to be accepted he might well be suspected of having stolen 

 the loose money found in his pocket. But those figures are 

 not correctly placed. We have no right to charge our cow 

 with the price those consumed crops would have sold for in 

 market, unless we also credit the farm with whatever of 

 profit there may have been from the production of those 

 crops and selling them at full market rates. The hay grown 

 on our Massachusetts farms does not cost what it will 

 usually sell for in market. The cost of a ton of hay to him 

 who produces it is just what it will cost to grow that hay and 

 put it in the barn, — perhaps &ve dollars, perhaps more, per- 

 haps less. If the meadow on which it grew can be made to 

 yield uniformly, year after year, by top-dressing it with the 

 manure made from the hay, the cost will be reduced to the 

 interest and taxes on the land, the labor of applying the 

 manure, and the cost of cutting and housing the hay. If I 

 do all my team work with oxen that are so well fed and cared 

 for that they can be made to bring in a handsome income 

 from their growth or increased value as beef, I cannot charge 

 their labor into my larm expense account, and give neither 

 the farm nor the oxen due credit, without doing violence to 

 all the rules of book-keeping. If properly placed, figures 

 will not lie, but otherwise they may deceive most mischiev- 

 ously. 



We have been complaining somewhat of late of the low 

 prices at which our milk is selling, and it would be very 

 gratifying to us if it would bring more. It would bring us 

 more if we only knew how to reduce the cost of selling it. 

 But even at the low prices at which our milk sells at the 

 farm, the fact still stares us in the face, that if we will not 

 longer sell at those figures, there are plenty of others, not far 



