72 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



milk ? " he is probably able to tell ; then we check it up by 

 going to the creamery and seeing if his method is accurate. 

 If we ask him for his total expenses, he doesn't always know, 

 but if I say, " How much did you spend for horseshoeing ? " 

 his wife will be right around there to jog his memory, you 

 bet, and you will get pretty close to it. We say, " How much 

 was your threshing bill ? " and we get that, because he knows 

 he had so many oats, and so forth, and he gives us the yield 

 and we know there is so much oats, and at so much a bushel, 

 and we get the threshing bill in that way, and so we can 

 check it right straight along, and check up all the points, 

 because we know most of these things. Then we have the cost 

 accounts on a good many farms which help us. Then you can 

 ask him his yield in hay and you can judge by the barn 

 capacity whether he overestimated it or not. Then, you 

 see, these conclusions are very sweeping. When a man gets 

 $3 and another $3 and another $3, right straight through, 

 and one fellow overestimates a couple of dollars on his horse- 

 shoeing bill, you see it doesn't make any great difference in 

 the end. 



Mr. Race. ISTow, the speaker discourages buying a farm 

 and starting in with a small field, but a man hasn't any 

 courage to work for a home on a hired farm. The farm 

 should have a home value. Then he hasn't said anything 

 about the boys who leave home, the best of them, who leave 

 their fathers on the farms that aren't good enough for them 

 to do farming on. I was talking with a big milk dealer in 

 Port Chester, a suburb of 'Rew York, the other day, and he 

 said he owned a farm in Egremont on which he had 30 cows, 

 and he says to me, " I have sold the milk from those cows 

 and I have got the money to show ; it was $4,000 last season." 

 He hired a man, a boss farmer. He doesn't do any work on 

 his farm, but the boss farmer is working it, doing work for 

 another man. He says to me, " I have got too big a farm. 

 I have 130 acres and we have got to come to a smaller farm." 

 Now, that is true ; we have got to come to the smaller farm 

 to get the boys that have gone away to come back to the 

 farm. The boys want to go to the city where they get the 

 salaries. We only produce 7 per cent more in this county 



