CHAPTER IV. 



MIXED FARMING. 



EMEMBER that I started out with practically no 

 knowledge of farming. There was only one thing 

 to do, and that was to work about as my neighbors 

 did. In fact, I had never given any particular 

 thought to the subject, and, doubtless, supposed 

 that there was only that way to do. I kept the 

 cows I had and bought another, so as to make us a small dairy, 

 because every one else kept a dairy. That was a part of farming 

 as I knew of it. I tried to get in every crop I could that others 

 about me raised, with no thought but to get the work done. 

 I spread myself over just as much of the run-down upland as I 

 could that first season. I put in a large garden, and knew more 

 about how to do that than anything else. The common custom 

 then was to send the milk to the factory. Cheese factories were 

 just well started all about us; in fact, I started the first ones 

 before leaving the firm of Straight, Terry & Co. About this mat- 

 ter I must have thought some. I remember reading in The 

 American Agriculturist about this time, that one could bring a 

 farm up better by making butter and selling that and feeding out 

 the skim milk on the farm. This seemed sensible to me, and we 

 did this way from the first. It put a great burden of work, how- 

 ever, on wife and me. But we were young and willing and cared 

 little for hard work if success would come the sooner. About 

 40 rods from the house was a spring. I dug this out and put 

 in a box for the water to flow into, built a cheap shed over it and 

 got some deep tin pails to set the milk in. By the way, what a 

 time we had the first time we tried to take the cream off one of 

 these pails ! Neither of us had ever seen anything of the kind in 

 use, nor read the particulars. I tried to skim that pail with a 

 common skimmer, such as we used to skim milk in pans. Of 

 course, it all ran through, being thin and not dried and leathery, 

 as on a pan. I told my wife there was no cream there; this sort 

 of work was a failure; cream wouldn't raise in a deep pail. But 

 one or the other of us at last discovered that the top of pail did 

 contain a little richer-looking milk than was found lower down, 

 and we got a little tin cup and tried dipping this surface off, and 

 then had no more trouble. We sold our butter for a fair price 

 and raised all the calves we could. Aside from the cow's own 

 calf, we bought another as the season advanced, and thus raised 

 about two calves per cow. And we succeeded pretty well at this. 



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