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ness, and we are glad to see that the majority of farmers 

 are awaking to this necessity. Unless personal and farm 

 accounts are kept separately the farmer is apt to use up 

 more money for personal and family expenses than his labor 

 would amount to if he performed it for some one else, 

 and then he complains that his business is unprofitable. 

 Besides, unless such accounts are kept, there is a liability 

 that you will have to pay the same account twice, or that 

 memory will fail you, and that you may overpay an ac- 

 count that you owe, or may receive less than is due you 

 on some account. But of more consequence, even than 

 the foregoing are Crop and Stock accounts. I have known 

 men who made a fair profit on their crops taken as a whole 

 (although on certain crops they lost a proportion of what 

 they made on others), to lose all the profit from their crops 

 by keeping unprofitable stock. If no account had been 

 kept, the result at the end of the year would have been 

 just the same, i. e. the farmer would have come out just 

 even. Do I hear those who claim that it is useless for 

 farmers to keep account exclaim, "that is just what we 

 have always said, accounts are no good anyhow." Let us 

 see. If no account had been kept, the farmer, at the end 

 of the year would have known one thing, viz., that he did 

 not make anything, but for his life he could not have told 

 you why. He would probably have said, "Farming don't 

 pay." But with his crop and stock accounts to enlighten 

 him he finds that he made on his acre of early vegetables 

 (which for want of space I will not particularize) a 

 clear profit of $100; on his 2 acres of potatoes a clear 

 profit (and by profit I mean the net return after deduct- 

 ing all expense, including labor of himself at its market 

 value) of $100 more, but that his crop of late cabbage 

 which he planted in very wet ground, and lost over half 

 the heads because the plants grew clubfooted, failed to re- 

 turn as much as it cost him by 820. His corn crop just 

 paid, that is after allowing full value for the stover for fod- 



