1877.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
419 
wagon to sell skim-milk in town. Except for this, 
there has been very little indeed sold from the 
place, besides the regular semi-weekly product of 
butter, and the balance to-the-good in the “ Pro¬ 
duce sold ” account, may fairly be set down as the 
net proceeds of the sales of butter. The skimmed 
milk and other sales would just about pay for the 
milk bought. 
Produce Sold Account. 
Dr. to Purchases. Cr. by Sales. Net Credit. 
Whole ten years.$3,114.85 $23,321.82 $20,206.97 
First year.No purchases. 826.07 826.07 
Last year. 337.73 2,866.17 2,529.44 
Best year, (1873). 1,352.62 5,690.66 4,338.04 
The year 1873 is the only single year, for which 
the account has been made up in detail. This was 
published in Ogden Farm Papers No. 49 (March, 
1874). In this year the sales of butter were rather 
more than the “net credit ” of all sales. We made 
5,912 pounds, which we sold for {net cash, after de¬ 
ducting all charges for home consumption, expres- 
sage, and commission,) $4,472.85, being over 75 cts. 
per pound for the whole product. 
For more than five years past, we have made all 
of our regular sales at $1 per pound, getting this 
price for all we could supply at all regularly. Usu¬ 
ally in June, with many fresh cows, and with the 
Newport season not fairly commenced, we have 
had to sell our swplus for less—generally for 50 cts. 
—and we have always sold from 600 to 1,200 lbs. 
yearly, through an agent in Boston, on which we 
have paid 12J cts. commission. Making all of these 
deductions, we have never averaged so little, for 
any year of the past five, as 75 cts. per pound. In 
securing this result, we have never made any con¬ 
siderable outlay, beyond what would be necessary 
in the care of any ordinary dairy. Indeed, as we 
have gone on and gained experience, we have 
cheapened and simplified our methods from those 
at first adopted, and I think we now make our but¬ 
ter as cneaply as any tolerably good dairyman in 
the country. Neither have we gone to any great 
expense in advertising. We have always taken the 
utmost pains to have the butter as go :>d as it could 
be made, to put it up in an attractive form, and to 
make it known by actual trial. We began selling 
at;50 cts., and we took measures to get it into the 
hands of people who could appreciate it. We 
raised the price first to 65 cts., then to 75 cts., to 
90 cts., and to $1—and there it has remained for 
five years past. Customers sometimes suggest that 
we ought to conform to the usual lowering of 
prices, but they rarely enforce the suggestion by 
stopping their purchases ; when they do so, there 
is always some one else ready to succeed them. It 
would be pure guess work for me to say to what 
an extent this business might be carried, and any 
one else can guess as well as I can. 
If butter-making had been our chief industry, we 
should have made fully fifty per cent more than we 
have, and I think I could have disposed of it all at 
the 6ame price. Butter-making has always been 
incidental and subordinate to our business of rais¬ 
ing and selling Jersey cattle, so that we have always 
kept some cows which were no longer of much use 
for the dairy, for the sake of their calves, and we 
have kept all in fair breeding condition, when by 
higher feeding we could have added very much to 
their butter product. It has been our aim to render 
the butter-making incident an important incident. 
I think it will be admitted that in this branch of 
our work we have been successful and practical. 
Really the most important question about our en¬ 
terprise, relates to the character of the soil, as at¬ 
tested by our course of treatment. For ten years 
we have bought very nearly all the grain fed on the 
place—and we have averaged the equivalent of 25 
to 35 cows. For three years we bought nearly all 
of our hay ; for three years more we bought about 
one-half of what was used; and for the last four 
years we have bought very little hay or forage of 
any kind. The total cost of the purchased food 
will be given in a future number of this series. 
During all this time we have practically sold 
nothing from the farm save butter, a little skimmed 
milk, and a moderate number of cattle. When we 
began, the land was as poor as it could well be—so 
poor that the hay crop amounted to very little in¬ 
deed. The firet year we did not cut the equivalent 
of ten tons all told. In 1876 the land (60 acres) was 
divided about as follows: yard, house, and barn-lot, 
garden, etc., 4 acres; fodder-corn, 6 acres; oats, 
(cut green), 6 acres ; grass, 44 acres. The crop of 
hay and cured oats (so much as was not fed green) 
was over 95 tons, although the latter part of the 
season was so very dry that there was no second 
crop at all. In an ordinary season we should have 
had at least 20 tons. The crop of 1877 has been 
very poor so far as hay was concerned, (although 
the oat6 were a capital crop, and the fodder-corn 
very fine). The failure of the grass crop was not 
due to the quality of the land, but to the fact that 
the drouth—and the immense cloud of grasshop¬ 
pers—of 1876, entirely destroyed the grass. Where 
we cut 21 tons of hay to the acre in 1876, we had 
cut a half ton of weeds in 1877. We have al¬ 
ways cut some of the early grass for soiling—less 
this year than usual. 
How much of the improved condition of the land 
is due to draining, and how much to the large 
amount of manure made on the place, can not be 
determined. Both have been important. About 
six acres was, some 7 or 8 years ago, plowed about 
twelve inches deep. The subsoil of blue clay, 
which was brought to the surface, was a lasting in¬ 
jury to the land. It still shows the ill effect of the 
treatment, in spite of time and manure. Certainly 
in this case—and I think many other similar in¬ 
stances could be found—deep plowing was a grave 
mistake, and it will be well for all enthusiasts who 
are disposed to follow the extreme theories of the 
deep plowers, to study very cautiously the charac¬ 
ter of the subsoil which they propose to bring to 
the surface. I confess to having been an advocate 
of these theories for many years, and I have seen 
them sustained on certain soils, but I have slowly 
come to the belief that it is usually the safest plan 
to leave the “ surface soil” where nature made it, 
and where she always keeps it in her most fertile 
forests and fields. 
Tim Bunker on the Canning Factory. 
“Have you heerd on’t,” asked Uncle Jotham 
Sparrowgrass, one evening last winter, as he walked 
into our sitting room, and sat down by the stove— 
“ we are gwyne to have a factory in Hookertown, 
next summer, to put up tomatoes and apples, and 
all sorts of fruits and vegetables, in tin cans.” 
“Want to know ! ” exclaimed Mrs. Bunker, rais¬ 
ing the gold-bowed spectacles that Josiah, our son- 
in-law gave her, “ where did you get the news ? ” 
“ Deacon Smith told me so over to the bank to¬ 
day—capital is all raised and money all promised 
whenever they are ready to begin. They used to 
have the same kind of thing over on the Island 
more’n thirty years ago, only they used glass cans 
instead of tin, and the work was done at home in¬ 
stead of in a factory. Don’t believe they’ll du it 
any better now—ye see if they du—Mrs. Sparrow- 
grasses presarves will never be beat in our day.” 
“It will be just like the sorghum mill started 
here in war times—see if ’taint,” said Jake Frink. 
“ They made a great swell, and you’d ’a thought 
that Hookertown Street was gwyne to run with 
merlasses. The thing went up in tu year, and now 
yer can’t git any kind o’ decent sweetening short of 
fifty cents a gallon ; I don’t take any more stock in 
that sort of thing.” 
“ Nobody expected you would,” said Seth Twiggs, 
dropping a live coal from the stove on the bowl of 
his meerschaum, “your capital is already invested 
down to the gin palace.” 
“The age of merikles ain’t past yit, is it?” said 
Tucker, in a meditative mood. 
“I wonder if there’ll be any rum made of the 
leavings?” inquired Jones, expectantly, recalling 
his experience on a sugar plantation. 
“Not a bit of it,” said Seth, with a merry twin¬ 
kle in his eye, and an extra puff at his pipe, that 
by this time was in full blast. “ Suckers will go 
dry around the canning factory when they git her 
started. Ye see they work up the skins and leav¬ 
ings of the termarter6 into catchup according tew 
the Scripter, ‘ gather up the fragments that nothing 
be lost,’ as Mister Spooner would say.” 
This conversation of my neighbors, last winter, 
was the first I heard of the new enterprise. On 
further inquiry, I learned that a Hookertown young 
man, named Rudd, had been in Jersey for several 
years, working at the business in a factory there, 
and was coming home to set up for himself. I 
liked this for two reasons. It was a new industry, 
and would help the town, and then it always looks 
well to see a Hookertown boy, when he gets start¬ 
ed in life, coming back among his old neighbors 
and friends, to help himself, and help them get 
ahead in the world. 
Rudd had got some money, and, what is better, 
had learned the business, and got a good name for 
capacity and integrity in carrying it on. So he 
passed muster at the bank, and the neighbors who 
had money, like Deacon Smith, and myself, took 
stock, and those who had brains, and not mnch 
money, like Mr. Spooner and the Schoolmaster, 
talked in its favor at the Farmers’ Club, and men, 
like Jones and Tucker, who had neither brains nor 
money, threw ap their old hats and hurrar’d for the 
factory that was to be. A few old stagers, like Un¬ 
cle Jotham Sparrowgrass, and Jake Frink, hung on 
the outskirts of the movement, and tried to make 
backwater. But it didn’t amount to any more than 
a row boat in the wake of a Connecticut River 
steamer, coming down when the 6toam is all on, 
and the tide is in her favor. The thing ripped 
right along just as if nothing was the matter. 
The first thing Rudd did after the capital was 
taken, was to get the farmers around Hookertown 
to agree to raise tomatoes. He said they were just 
as 2 asy to raise as corn or potatoes, the crop was 
just as certain, it did not exhaust the soil near as 
much, and would pay better for the labor. Then 
he distributed the seed, and told them how to start 
the plants in hot-beds, and when to put them out. 
There was a great stir in Hookertown, and toma¬ 
toes was the town talk all through the spring. The 
general inquiry on Hookertown green, between the 
meetings on Sunday, was, not “How is your 
folks”? but “How’s the plants getting along”? 
and “ how many are you gwyne to put out ” ? Mr. 
Spooner, I suppose, did not know any thing about 
the worldliness of the people, but thought they 
were discussing the sermon, or other things of the 
kingdom. Meanwhile the factory was put up on 
the Shadtown road, just on the edge of the village, 
where there is plenty of elbow room. It is a plain 
cheap building, with ample space upon the ground 
floor, and a half story above for storing cans after 
they are made. Fifty thousand cans require a good 
deal of room, and these can be made and stored 
when fruits and vegetables are out of season. 
Every body went to see the new factory, with its 
broad ten-feet platforms all around it, to hold the 
fruit; the thousand or more bushel boxes piled up 
to the eaves ; the steam engine ; the tanks for 
scalding, and the bigger tanks for cooking; the 
patent sort of sausage stuffer for packing the toma¬ 
toes in the cans; the soldering machine where a 
boy seals two cans a minute all day long; the 
grinder where they work up the refuse, and make 
elegant tomato catsup. It was about as good as 
going to the menagerie to go to the factory, and see 
Mr. Rudd show up the various contrivances of the 
canning business to our women folks. They all 
wanted to see, and said they guessed Mr. Rudd un¬ 
derstood the business. 
Jake Frink said “ He didn’t know but the feller’s 
head was level, arter all, but he wasn’t gwyne to 
plant any termarters this year, any how.” 
Well, the factory has been running through the 
season, and the talk on the green now, between 
meetings, is, “How did yer termarters turneout?” 
The yield runs anywhere from two to four hundred 
bushels, according to the manure and cultivation 
given to the crop. At four hundred bushels, at 30 
cents a bushel—the gross amount is $120 an acre. 
There is a good deal of labor in picking, and mar¬ 
keting, but not more than in the potato crop. It 
has this great advantage, that it is disposed of di¬ 
rectly from the field, has to be handled only once, 
and brings ready money on delivery. The factory 
