MONEY IN THE SOIL.
Relation between Soils and Skulls--The Secrets of Successful
Farming--Why go to Alaska when there are Gold Mines at the
Home--Jute, a Keyword to Fortune--A Million Dollars in this
Suggestion--What Ignorance Costs the American Farmer--A Rival of
King Cotton--Doubling One’s Money in Fowls--How to get a Big Apple
Crop every Year--$6,000 a Year to go to South America--Or, If you
want to Go West, Uncle Sam will give you a Slice of Land--Onions
the “Open Sesame” to Fortune--Breaking Records with
Potatoes--Yankees and Hickory Nuts--How “Plunger” Walton made a
Fortune in Two Years--The Great Elmendorf Stock-Farm.
We often hear it said that there is no money in farming. On the other
hand, there are few occupations in which there is so much money, if the
work is carried on in the right way. The trouble is that people often
think it takes little intellect to be a farmer. The truth is just the
reverse. To get returns out of the soil there must be brains in the
skull. We know a farmer on Long Island with less than sixty acres of
land who has acquired a fortune in fifteen years of close application to
the problems of the farm. He has found the secret of knowing how to make
Nature give down her milk. Every foot of land is under cultivation, and
although he employs often as many as two score of men, he gives every
part of the work his personal inspection. Further than this, his three
secrets of success, he tells us, are, What, When and Where--What to
plant, When to plant, and Where to market.
Do you know it is a fact that $500,000,000 more was received from the
sale of crops this year than last? What do you think of that, you
Klondikers who suffer hardships in the Alaskan mountains for the sake of
a little gold which, after all, you will probably never get? If the gold
output of the newly discovered regions of the far North reaches this
year $10,000,000--a most liberal estimate, and probably two or three
times the actual yield--remember that the soil right here at home, with
one-half the labor and none of the risk of life, has yielded fifty times
that amount. And this is not the actual yield, but only the surplus over
and above what the fields gave the year before. Five hundred millions of
gold more than last year dug out of the soil--think of it! In the
following examples we only give the byways of farming--that is, what can
be done, by the cultivation of a single product, and not what may be
accomplished in the regular way. Of course, much more can be made by the
raising of several staples, and by a systematic rotation of crops.