308 Transactions of tee American Institute. 



money from your wheat will buy you a house. By this time yon 

 will ask very few questions of any one, for you will see what is to be 

 done, and know how to do it. Don't take any stock in subsoiling 

 your prairie sod ; men have done it, and have raised fifty bushels of 

 corn to the acre. Men have raised steers that weighed 3,000 pounds, 

 but you don't want to until you can afford it, and a poor man can- 

 not. I have seen folks buy farms and prairie land, and make farms 

 for fifteen years ; and four-fifths of all who go right on to their own 

 raw prairie, build their house, dig their well, build their stable, buy 

 their team, break their prairie, and the next year put in their crop, 

 and have to buy all they live on all this time,, will find their money 

 all gone, and their pluck too. You may ask how much money a man 

 ought to have to do as I have suggested ; $500, but $350 will do. 

 Suppose he has not got that, what can he do I I will tell you, "We 

 will suppose that every man at the age of twenty-five, who has a 

 wife, can, after paying all he owes, buy two tickets to Iowa. If he 

 has, and they are both willing to work, he is all right. Thousands 

 of us farmers are glad to see him. One came out just that way one 

 year ago last spring. He hired out for twenty dollars per month, 

 and his wife, at the same place,, at two dollars and fifty cents per 

 week. Last winter he bought a span of four-year-old horses, one-half 

 cash, the balance this fall, one good cow and one hog. He has 

 worked 110 acres of corn, oats, and wheat this summer, and yester- 

 day asked me about this 160 acre lot up between me and town, say- 

 ing he would like to buy it. A few words to men with money : if 

 you have $1.5,000 to fool away, go and buy a steam plough.. If he 

 wants to plough his land at a cost not to exceed fifty cents per acre, I 

 will tell you how. I have three gang-ploughs, and nine yoke of oxen 

 and three drivers. The ploughs cost about ninety dollars each, the 

 oxen $125 per yoke, the driver's labor and board one dollar per day. 

 They can average four acres per day each. My oxen are good for the 

 money at any time ; I have only to calculate the wear and tear on 

 plough, yoke and chain, and feed to the oxen, and the one dollar per 

 day for the man, and find, by actual experience, that fifty cents per 

 acre covers the cost of ploughing; With this way of ploughing, 

 mark one way, and plant with the two-horse corn-planter, then har- 

 row, then plough twice each way,, and my corn is laid by at a cost of 

 two dollars and fifty cents per acre, and I hire everything done. 



