890 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



village, buys harnesses, wagons, mowers, reapers, poisons. He seems 

 to others and even to himself a man of means, spending these large 

 amounts. But for all his expenditures his returns are only those of 

 a moderately paid factory-hand. He has to have all those horses 

 and that rolling stock as a prerequisite for earning his day's wages. 



Despite the increased price of provisions in the past few years, I 

 doubt ii the farmer has begun to feel the advance. Cost of production 

 has increased. Think of the single item of the cost of fighting quack 

 grass, which has spread through thousands of square miles that 

 knew it not a generation ago. Farming is 20 per cent slower where 

 the pest exists. We have dozens of insects preying upon both plants 

 and animals, which our grandfathers never saw, and this means 

 poisons and washes and machines to apply them, to say nothing of 

 the time spent in applying them. Soil depletion means more fertilizer 

 and the price of fertilizer does not merely increase. It jumps. 



290. FARM INCOME BETTER THAN CITY INCOME 1 



Colonel J. B. Power was for thirty years a surveyor and railroad 

 builder before he settled down on his farm in North Dakota. Now, 

 at eighty, he has had thirty years of practical experience in farming, 

 but has always kept in close touch with city affairs. He is particularly 

 well equipped to compare the farmer's income with the income of the 

 city man. 



"One of my sons is president of a bank in St. Paul," said Colonel 

 Power. "Another is president of a large manufacturing company in 

 Minneapolis and a third is here on the farm with me. All are married 

 and have families, and all make good incomes. Of the three incomes, 

 however, that from the farm is not only the most easily earned but 

 it leaves a larger cash surplus than either of my other sons has at 

 the end of the year. Our farm here contains 2,500 acres and repre- 

 sents a total investment of about $100,000. We actually till 1,112 

 acres, of which this year 480 acres was in crops and the balance was 

 pasture land. Of these crops our wheat brought $3,734, oats $1,080, 

 barley $300, fodder $686, hay $625, potatoes $150. Besides these 

 crops there was a garden from which we got vegetables and fruit for 

 our two families my son's and my own as well as for the hired help. 



"The total cash value of the crops grown on the farm in this year 

 was $6,575 and the total cost in cash of operating the farm was 



Adapted from The World's Work, XXIV (September, 1912), 587-89. 



