CHAPTER XVI

NOVEL LIVE STOCK


    Occasionally we hear stories of the wealth which is being made on a frog farm here or there. But as a rule little commercial success has attended attempts in this direction.

    The difficulty lies in feeding them. A single frog can be fed by dangling a piece of meat before it, but it would be impossible to feed thousands this way. There are so many enemies that few tadpoles become adult frogs; besides, the frog is a cannibal and will eat not only the larvae or eggs, but the tadpoles and young frogs as well.

    Frog culture is successful in some places where ponds are large enough to be partitioned, separating the tadpoles and young frogs from the old ones, and where insects are abundant enough to supply food naturally for them. Near San Francisco there are a number of frog ranches. Even in 1903, according to Mary Heard in Out West, one ranch sold to San Francisco markets 2600 dozen frogs' legs, netting $1800. This was considered poor. Frogs' legs are sold to hotels and restaurants, and bring in New York, according to size and season, from fifty cents to a dollar a pound.

    Tons of frogs come to New York markets each year from Canada, Michigan, and from the South and West. Few people outside of the cities eat them. The United States Fish Commissioners reported the product in one year: Arkansas, 58,800 lb., valued at $4162; Indiana, 24,000 lb., valued at $5026; Ohio, 14,000 lb., valued at $2340; Vermont, 5500 lb., valued at $825, etc.--a total of $22,953.

    The enormous and increasing prices of large diamond backed turtles, and the cheapness of little ones shows that maturing, at least, if not actually breeding them, would be well worth investigation. Many wealthy New Yorkers send direct to Maryland for their supplies. Where turtle meat is bottled or canned, the snapping turtle and the common box tortoise are sometimes used as "substitutes." Both are capital eating.

    The carp is one of the most excellent fresh water fish, and is of great value on account of the facility of culture and the enormous extent to which this is carried on. "In Europe some artificial ponds comprise an area of no less than 20,000 acres, and the proceeds amount to about 500,000 pounds of carp per annum." (Hessel, in "Carp and Its Culture.")

    It attains the weight of three to four pounds in three years without artificial feeding, and much more under more favorable conditions. It lives to a great age and continues to grow all the while.

    "In Europe it is common to see carp weighing from thirty to forty pounds and more, measuring nearly three and one half feet in length and two and three quarters feet in circumference."

    It lives on vegetable food, insects, larvae, and worms, and will not attack other fishes or their spawn. It is easy to raise, and, provided certain general rules are followed, success will attend its culture.

    The localities best adapted to a carp pond are those in which there is sufficient water at hand for the summer as well as the winter. A mud or loam soil is best adapted for such a pond. A rocky, gravelly ground is not suited for carp; the water should be the same depth all the year, as variation has an injurious effect on the fish.

    Carp spawn in the spring. In stocking a pond three females are calculated to two males. The females lay a great number of eggs, but only a small number are impregnated. The most liberal estimate will not exceed from 800 to 1000 to one spawner, the aggregate per acre amounting to from 4000 to 5000.

    The large cities containing large numbers of Europeans furnish the principal markets for carp. The Jewish people will not, as a rule, buy carp unless they are alive, so it is not an uncommon thing to see fish dealers in the Hebrew quarters pushing through the streets carts constructed as tanks and peddling the carp alive.

    Some years ago carp ponds were quite a fad among farmers of the Central West. Americans have been slow to adopt the German carp as a food fish.

    Trout, of course, can be raised, and the high prices which they bring, both in market and for fishing privileges, make them very attractive; but the cold running water needed makes opportunity for breeding them with access to a good market generally unavailable to owners of five acres.

    There is another fish, famous for its eating qualities, which well repays effort put upon its production. I refer to the black bass. It is indigenous to the waters of the Eastern states, where it is usually found in creeks or rivers. It can be successfully bred in properly constructed ponds.

    Mr. Dwight Lyell, in Forest and Stream, has this to say about a breeding place for the small-mouthed black bass. "The pond should be six feet deep in the center and two feet around the edge; the bottom should be of natural sand; water plants should be growing in profusion, particularly such aquatic plants as the Daphnia, Bosmina, and the Corix, to furnish food for the young bass. A good size for a breeding pond is 100 X 100 feet." For spawning, artificial nest frames are built in rectangular form. They are made two feet square without bottoms. On two adjoining sides these frames are four inches high and on the other two adjoining sides sixteen inches high. These frames are made because the bass needs a barrier behind which the spawning may be done and which will protect the nest when made. For raising the fish to a size large enough for food, ponds can be of any convenient size. In order to keep the water in healthful condition the pond must be fed by a flowing brook with some provision to prevent the water being disturbed by freshets. This can usually be arranged by a sluice to carry off the surplus water during heavy rains. Black bass raised in shallow ponds will take the fly all summer, so that considerable may be made from fishing privileges.

    In the absence of minnows, which are the food of the bass, they must be fed on fresh liver cut in threads like an angle worm to tempt the fish. Even then the liver diet must be varied by feeding minnows from September until the bass goes into winter quarters. In no other way can fertile eggs be assured for the spring hatching. Minnows left in the pond all winter will breed and so furnish fry on which the young bass can feed tile next summer."

    What has been said refers particularly to the small-mouthed black bass. The conditions are substantially the same for the large-mouthed bass (which grows to a much larger size), except that the bottom may be made of Spanish moss imbedded in cement.

    There is a growing market for the young bass or fingerlings to stock streams and ponds. The relation between the producer of stock fish and those who expect to raise bass of a marketable size is about the same as exists between the professional seed grower and the market gardener. It is much better for the small farmer who has or can make an artificial pond to buy his fingerlings from the professional breeder, who has facilities which are too elaborate to be duplicated on a small scale.

    Fish culture, except under government auspices, is little known in the United States.

    American Homes and Gardens has an account of the breeding of pheasants, which is of interest. That it is possible to breed pheasants, even around an ordinary suburban home, is shown by Mr. Homer Davenport, the famous cartoonist, who succeeded in breeding and raising some of the choicest pheasants on his place at Morris Plains, New Jersey.

    A great variety of species are commonly bred, but all of them came from China or India. The pheasant can be tamed by careful handling, but cats and dogs and other small animals must be kept away. The pheasantry should be placed on high, well-drained ground with a southern exposure, where the soil is good enough to raise clover, oats, and barley. The quarters for pheasants and the management are very much like those for fancy chickens. The yard should be inclosed by wire netting both on sides and top to keep the birds from wandering away; and there should be houses for roosting and breeding with nesting quarters attached.

    In Central Park, New York, the running space allotted to three or four birds is not more than ten by twenty feet, and Mr. George Ethelbert Walsh tells of a case where sixty pheasants were kept in excellent condition in a house ten by fifty feet, with five yards attached, averaging 10 X 25 feet. However, with pheasants, as with all the bird family, especially turkeys, the more ground they have for ranging the less liable they will be to disease. The chief difficulty in breeding game birds like the pheasant is to secure the insects, such as flies, maggots, and ant eggs, which are the natural food of the young. Sufficient green food like lettuce, turnip tops, cabbage, etc., must also be provided. There is always a market at fancy prices for more of the matured birds than can possibly be supplied.

    Some people make money in breeding or training fancy birds like canaries, mocking birds, finches, parrots, and so on; but this industry can be carried on almost as well in rooms in the city as in the country. Specializing on any kind of animal rearing must be gone into with extreme caution, because in the breeding of animals there are many factors to be dealt with which do not confront the breeder of plants. Make haste slowly, and before branching out be sure that you master each step in its turn.

    An industry which is practically unknown in this country, but which flourishes in Burgundy, France, is the raising of snails for food. Those who are shocked by this will he surprised to learn that snail culture was practiced by the Romans at the time of the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey, as Jacques Boyer says in American Homes and Gardens. The snail lays from fifty to sixty eggs annually. They are deposited in a smooth hole prepared for them in the ground and hatched within twenty days. So rapidly do they grow that they are ready for market six or eight weeks after hatching. The snail park is made by inclosing a plot of damp, limy soil with smooth boards coated with tar to prevent the snails climbing out, and held in place by outside stakes strong enough to withstand the wind. The boards must penetrate the soil to the depth of eight inches at least, and at a level with the ground they must have a sort of shelf to prevent the snails from burrowing under them. When the snail encounters an obstacle in its path, it lays its eggs, sensible beast. Ten thousand snails can be raised on a plot of land one hundred by two hundred feet. The ground is plowed deeply in the spring, the snails are placed on it and covered with from two to four inches of moss or straw which is kept damp. They must be fed daily with lettuce, cabbage, vine leaves, or grass; as they eat at night, they are fed shortly before sunset. Aromatic herbs, like mint, parsley, etc., are planted in the inclosure to improve the flavor of the snails.

    In October, the snails having become fat through the summer, retire into their shells, the mouths of which they close with a thin gelatinous covering. They are now ready for picking, and are put on screens or trays which are piled together in storehouses, where they remain several months without food. When the fast has been sufficiently prolonged, the shells are brushed up and the snails cooked in salt water in a great pot holding about ten thousand. When cooked, they are immediately sent to the consumer in wooden boxes holding from fifty to two hundred. The business is a very profitable one, as the snail is considered a great delicacy by epicures.

    Perhaps the silkworm is not exactly in place in a chapter on Novel Live Stock. It is at present not much more than an interesting experiment, but there will be money in silkworm culture as soon as a market for the product is developed. The main difficulty is lack of food, as the worm thrives best on the leaf of the white mulberry tree. Until a substitute is found, it will be necessary therefore to set out young trees, which in two years will bear enough leaves to supply food. The labor of silkworm rearing all comes in one month. It can be carried on in any large, airy room The eggs are hatched by the summer heat, and the worm does not become a heavy eater until the last two weeks. It sheds its skin four times, and after the final moult it climbs into loose brush prepared for it and spins the cocoon. These are then dried and shipped.

    At the South, where the climate is well suited for silk culture, an obstacle has been found in the unadaptability of the cheap labor, particularly colored labor, to the delicate handling, and especially winding of the silk from the cocoons.

    Many people make money by breeding dogs. Not much land is required and very little capital, as kennels can be multiplied as demand increases. There is always a profitable market for dogs, and some of the lap species, like the King Charles spaniel, bring fabulous prices. Hunting dogs, such as setters, pointers, retrievers, really require a game country and a practical hunter who can train the puppies, to make much of a success of it; with these, if properly handled, the business is a safe one, as there is little other technical skill required beyond ordinary care, such as is given to domestic animals.

    Cats are a better venture than dogs because they are sold to women who will pay any price for what strikes their fancy. Fashions in cats change about as fast as fashions in coats, but cats breed faster than coats wear out, so it is quick business.

    Just now, coon cats, tortoise-shell cats, and bizarre colors of Persian cats are mostly in vogue, but the tailless Manx cat, and even freaks like the six-toed cat and Iynx cats always find a ready market.

    Of course, these can be raised in the city, but if it is done in a large enough way to make a living out of it, the Board of Health and the neighbors will raise--something else.

    Fishing and hunting are primitive industries of which we think only in connection with wild land. But every bay and pond and wood will supply at least some subsistence or profit to the intelligent seeker.

    Oysters, clams, crabs, mussels, frogs, and common fish are found in abundance in many places, and help out with table expenses. Even English sparrows are delicious.

    Almost any wild animal is much more wholesome to eat than pork. Squirrels and even weasels are cleaner feeders than pigs, and the Indians eat them with great relish, while everybody knows the keenness of the darkies for "coon." Most snakes are better eating than eels and not near so repulsive--when you get used to them.

    The woodchuck is a nuisance to the farmer, covering his field with loads of subsoil from the burrow and then eating the tender sprouts; and the farmer does not know enough to eat his tender corpse, but he is good to eat. If a rabbit and a chicken could have young, it would taste like a woodchuck

    Muskrats, mink, raccoons, and gray and fox squirrels are easily trapped; and the skins of those killed in that way find a steady market. Skins of poisoned animals do not sell so well, as they are rough and dry.

    In order to be profitable, these do not need to pay very well in proportion to the time they take, since they are hunted as recreation and at odd times.

    But there is a larger field in raising wild animals, which our Western people have not been slow to avail themselves of, and we hear of men being prosecuted for breeding wolves, coyotes, and bobcats, a kind of lynx, to get the government bounty for the snouts or scalps.

    In a legitimate way profit may be had from such animals.

    Ernest Thompson Seton has an article in Country Life in America, on raising fur-bearing animals for profit; this offers a good chance for small capital and large intelligence. He suggests the beaver, mink, otter, skunk, and marten, and says that whoever would begin fur farming is better off with five acres than with five hundred. He describes two fox ranches at Dover, Maine. They raise twenty to forty silver foxes a year, on a little more than half an acre of land. The silver fox's fur is one of the most valuable on the market and sells at an average of $150 a pelt, that is, $3000 to $6000 gross for the year's work. Foxes are not expensive to breed, their food consisting chiefly of sour milk and cornmeal or flour made into a cake, and a little meat about once a week.

    The capital required is small. A fence for the inclosure should be of one and a half inch mesh No. 16 galvanized wire, ten feet high, with an overhang of eighteen inches to keep the foxes from escaping, and is about the only outlay except for purchase of stock.

    Stakes should be driven close to the fence to keep them from burrowing out.

    They are naturally clean animals, and with careful attention are free from disease. Mr. Stevens reports that in his two years' experience he has had twenty to thirty foxes and lost none by disease, while Mr. Norton, with five years' experience, carrying thirty to forty, reports that one to two die each year.

    They breed as well in captivity as in their wild state, usually bringing forth a litter of six or seven in the spring. These breed the following spring and their fur is ready for market the following December. And now breeders sell fine stock to other breeders who are entering the industry, sometimes getting three to four hundred dollars per pair. Mr. Seton remarks, "I am satisfied that any man who has made a success of hens can make a success of foxes, with this advantage for the latter a fox requires no more space or care than a hen, but is worth twenty times as much, and so gives a chance for returns twenty times as large."

    This is an infant industry, but if others can get the same results, it will pay handsomely. To get the best furs, however, requires a district where the winters are cold and long.

    There are a few skunk farms in the West. It is said that the scent gland can be taken out, though that is not necessary, and that the farms do well. Their oil is also said to be valuable. But while skunks are so common there cannot be much in breeding them.

    If your fancy goes to "critters" rather than crops it is much better to raise game birds. Wild turkeys raised under a hen or in an incubator and made pretty tame (if too tame they do not thrive so well in a small area), "wild " ducks, grouse, partridges, quails, even wood ducks which build their nests in trees are no longer experiments.

    All the common enemies you have to contend against are foxes, dogs, cats, rats, mink, skunks, hawks, owls, crows, frogs, turtles, snakes, poachers, game legislators, and disease.

    It has been calculated that one pair of quails and its
progeny would produce five or six million birds in eight years if there were no losses. But so would chickens; and probably you will not get that many.

    All about these game birds is set forth in an advertising booklet called, "Game Farming" of the Hercules Powder Co., which has offices in a dozen cities, so we need not enlarge.






CHAPTER XVII

WHERE TO GO


    Intensive cultivation, raising a big crop on little land, can be carried on most profitably near areas of dense population; for perishable products, like fruits and vegetables, can be best marketed near the consumer. The limit for delivery by auto is about fifteen to twenty miles, and then only if roads are good; if the land selected lies on the line of a railroad which gives equal terms to way freight and to through freight, you will fare nearly as well. Railroads control agricultural development. Sparsely settled regions always practice extensive cultivation, raising light crops on big farms, because only such crops can be grown as can be raised on large areas by machinery, and are not perishable. Staples like corn, wheat, pork, and beef are transported at low prices for long distances by the railroads. This forces the settlers in newly opened portions of the country to sell in a market created by the railroads, in competition with what is produced within the areas of intensive cultivation, that is, with access to adjacent markets.

    So we find the bonanza wheat farms of California, the Dakotas, and the Canadian Northwest, the pampas of the Argentine, the Steppes of Russia, and the Indian uplands devoted to wheat raising; in the United States corn belt, fields of from five to twenty thousand acres are still not uncommon. Conversely, intensive cultivation is most advanced in China, where a dense population forced the people long ago to bring into use every foot of tillable soil that is left open to them.

    Near the towns of the United States a few market gardeners supply such vegetables as the people do not raise for themselves. The states along the Atlantic seaboard have all the facilities for successful intensive cultivation--a dense population and idle, cultivable land. In choosing a location, the home crofter should well consider his experience, and try to enter a community where he can engage in analogous pursuits. Dairy regions never have enough men who understand cattle and horses; fruit-growing districts always need experienced pickers; market garden regions need men who understand rotating crops and making hotbeds, transplanting, etc.

    If you have a little money, you can probably do best by buying and draining some swamp land, which is the most productive of all, as it contains the washings of the upland for centuries. Swamp land can usually be cleared and drained for from thirty to forty dollars per acre. It can be bought very cheap and when ready to cultivate will have increased many times in value.

    The next best is the "abandoned" or worn-out farm. Proper methods of cultivation will bring it back to more than its original fertility. The Eastern states from Maine to Virginia abound with them at from five to twenty-five dollars per acre. In many cases the buildings are worth more than the whole price asked.

    The nearest land easily available in the East is in the state of New York. The writer believes it is true that "there are twenty thousand farms for sale in this state, and nearly, all at such low prices and upon such favorable terms as to make them available for any one desiring to engage in agriculture or have a farm home. The soil of these farms is not exhausted, but on the contrary is, with proper cultivation, very productive. Nearly all have good buildings and fences, are supplied with good water and plenty of wood for farm purposes, and in nearly all cases have apple and other fruit trees upon them." (List of Farms, occupied and unoccupied, for sale in New York State. Bureau of Information and Statistics, Bulletin, State of New York, Department of Agriculture.)

    These farms are distributed all over the state, some in nearly every county. In Sullivan County, for example, there are farms for sale ranging in price from ten to one hundred dollars per acre. These can, almost without exception, be bought by small payments, balance on long mortgages, and it is wonderful how cheap they are. In Ulster County thirty farms, some of which I have seen, are offered for sale at trifling prices.

    Of course, many of these farms have been sold since the first editions of this book, and the prices have advanced, perhaps on the average doubled; but cheap automobiles have improved roads and have made others available that were useless ten years ago. The development of the Southern states, with eradication of the cattle tick (the cause of "Texas Fever") and irrigation and rotation of crops, has opened up new countries. N. O. Nelson writes he has bought many Louisiana farms for his cooperative enterprise for about what the improvements are worth.

    Cut over woodlands which we have learned to make produce incomes of about five dollars each year per acre by intelligent forestry, as well as swamp lands which we now know how to make healthful by drainage and by the extinction of mosquitoes, can still be had at low prices in New York and other states. Numerous others are in the market from five dollars per acre up, and so it goes through the state, from Wyoming County in the extreme western end, where farms ranging from thirty to three hundred acres are in the market at from thirty to forty dollars per acre, to St. Lawrence County in the north, where land can be bought as low as fifteen dollars per acre.

    When it is considered that these lands are within easy access to established markets with transportation and mail facilities, rural delivery, and telephone a proper idea may be formed of their value in opportunity. The authority quoted further states that "probably fifty thousand agricultural laborers can find employment on the farms of New York at good wages. Families particularly are wanted to rent houses and work farms on shares." Wages for new hands run from twenty to thirty dollars and upwards per month with board. Men who know how to milk are especially in demand throughout the dairy regions. These conditions make it possible for experienced farmers, although entirely without money, to get to the soil.

    Over three hundred thousand aliens annually settled in the cities of New York State during some years in the last decade. These people could be got out of the cities, where in normal times they are little needed, into adjacent country districts where they are much needed.

    In the Real Estate Record and Guide, Mr. A. L. Langdon says: "It is most remarkable that there are on Long Island, within from thirty-five to seventy miles of New York, thousands of acres of land which have never been cultivated, which have for years produced nothing but cordwood, and which the owners allow to be overrun with fire almost every year. A large part of this land has soil two or three feet deep underlaid with gravel. The best water in the world is abundant and the climate is more equable than on the mainland, and in each locality where any reasonable effort has been made to cultivate the soil, it has produced plentifully of all fruits and vegetables which can be grown in this latitude."

    Long Island should produce all the fruit, vegetables, poultry, eggs, and milk needed by its own residents, with a large surplus for the city markets, instead of getting, as it does, a large part of its supply of these things from the city.

    When it is considered that about a quarter of a million acres of this land so close to the city is now scrub oak and uncultivated waste, and that there are about a million adult workers in the city, the importance of the experiment is obvious; especially as we learn from the United States census that over ten thousand of these workers are already in agricultural pursuits within the city limits.

    "Here midway on Long Island, and just beyond the limits for a man to locate who expects to earn his living by daily work in the city, is a territory about forty miles long and ten miles wide which by intensive farming would yield a good living for more than two hundred thousand inhabitants. In this agricultural section, a man of small means who expects to live on the land the year round, should purchase a plot not too small to produce enough to support himself and family and a surplus to sell, not less than six acres. Probably all men have more or less land hunger a desire to own land and it is a worthy object to encourage to the extent of inducing a man to purchase what he can pay for and be satisfied with, but it is a shameful thing to induce a poor man, who has to earn his living in New York, to buy on the installment plan a small lot so far from his place of employment that he cannot live on it and travel to and from his work every day, and where there is the strongest probability that he will never make more than two or three payments, and will consequently lose what he does pay." The writer hears of one plot which was sold nineteen times and the contracts defaulted on after payments, before any one took title.

    If the seeker is not satisfied with the opportunities which the state of New York offers, he may turn to New Jersey, equally accessible and equally rich in chances.

    New Jersey Year-Book: "There are in the southern part of the State large tracts of land which are still uncleared, or covered with brushwood, and which are adapted to tillage and capable of producing large crops of small fruits and market garden vegetables. The wood on them is mainly scrub oak, with some dwarfed pitch pine and yellow pine, and hence they are called oak lands to distinguish them from the more sandy lands and tracts on which the pitch pine grows almost exclusively. The latter are known as pine lands. The total area of cleared (farm) lands in the southern division of the State, southeast of the marl belt, is about 450,000 acres. The pineland belts have an aggregate area of 486,000 acres, making at least 800,000 acres accessible by railways from the large cities and also near to tidewater navigation. The maps of the Geological Survey show the location and the extent of these lands, their railway lines, and their relation to the settlements already made and to the cities.

    "The soils of these tracts are sandy and not naturally so rich and fertile as the more heavy clay soils of the limestone, the red shale, and the marl districts of the State, but they are not so sandy and so coarse-grained as to be non- productive, like some of the pineland areas. The latter are often deficient in plant food and are deservedly characterized as pine barrens, being too poor for farm purposes. The growth of oak and pine, as well as chemical analyses, shows that the oak-land soils contain the elements of plant production. They are not so well suited to pasturage or to continuous cropping as naturally rich virgin soils; they are better fitted for raising vegetables, melons, sweet potatoes, small fruits, peaches, and pears than wheat, Indian corn, hay, and other staples. The eminent superiority of this kind of farming in New Jersey over the old routine of wheat, corn, hay, and potatoes is well known. These South Jersey soils are easily cleared of brushwood or standing timber, and of stumps, with a hand or horse-power puller which is a cheap affair, and the wood is salable in all this part of the State at remunerative prices, often bringing more than the original cost of the land. The long working season and the short and mild winter favor the arrangement of work, so that all is done with the least outlay for help. They also favor the mosquitoes.

    "The success of Hammonton, Egg Harbor City, Vineland, and other places is notable, and equally good results are to be had at a hundred or more places as well situated as they are. These lands are sold at low figures, and the settler saves in capital and interest account. Only the difficulty of getting money to help in building interferes with rapid settlement.

    "The West Jersey Railway, the Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia and Reading's Atlantic City Railroad, the Philadelphia and Seashore Railway, the New Jersey Southern Railroad, and other branch roads afford excellent facilities for access to New York, Philadelphia, and the cities of the State. The Cohansey, Maurice, and Mullica rivers head well up near the northwest limits of these lands, and their navigable reaches run for miles across them. The waters of the Delaware Bay and the ocean are within a few miles of a large part of this oak-land domain.

    "The advantages of an old settled and Eastern State, within easy reach of these large markets, of land which is easily tilled and generous and quick in its response to feeding, and at low prices, make them equal to, if not better than, the rich prairie soils of a new West, or the low prices and cheap lands of the abandoned hillsides of New England."

    Wages for unskilled farm labor are about the same as for New York--twenty to twenty-five dollars per month. The canning and fruit industries make room for a large number of people in the late summer and fall, who may thus, by taking a temporary place, kind some permanent location where they may improve their health and fortunes.

    "Delaware also offers unequalled opportunities to immigrants. It is ideally situated on the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay, and is penetrated by numerous creeks and rivers.

    "The railroad, steam, and electric facilities of the State are developing steadily year by year, while every section of the State possesses easily navigable streams, with vessels for carrying freight and passengers.

    "Over fifteen millions of people live within a radius of three hundred miles; the large majority reside in cities and towns and furnish the finest markets in the world. Within five hundred miles are more than one third of the people of all North America.

    "Wilmington is a city of seventy-five thousand people, is growing rapidly, and is becoming a great manufacturing place.

    "These people may be reached in one day by the luscious fruits that grow in Delaware, and every one of them is perfectly happy when he gets a Delaware peach. Many other Delaware products are as good as the peaches.

    "As cattle and wheat raising developed in the great West, Delaware people thought that they were ruined. They did not change at once, but slowly discovered that the light lands are wonderfully productive of fruits and vegetables, and that they pay much better than cattle and grain ever could. But these new methods have not been adopted in all parts of the State, so that land neglected and unprofitable is for sale. The tides of immigration have swept westward and left Delaware untouched. Men, money, and enterprise are needed.

    " There are few unoccupied or 'abandoned' farms in Delaware." The land is mostly held by descendants of the early settlers, who form a species of landed aristocracy. Lately, owing to the younger members of these families having become established in the newer states and on account of the death or incapacity of the older members left in possession, there has been a marked tendency to sell off these farms. However, "a large proportion of the farms in Delaware are not for sale at any price. Some of them have been in the same family for generations, and if put on the market would sell for from one to two hundred dollars per acre."

    The soil is all the way from a heavy white oak clay, which is too stiff and too sticky for most crops, to very light sand.

    The heaviest clay is made lighter and more porous, and the lightest sand is readily made retentive of moisture and extremely productive, by plowing in different kinds of crops as green manure, such as cow peas, soy beans, the vetches, etc.; crimson clover, winter oats, rye, turnips, and numerous other crops may be sown in August or later, and produce a fine crop for turning under early in the spring. Crimson clover grows nearly all winter. Pure cold water is reached at from twenty to fifty feet by dug or driven wells.

    The climate is good; there are no cyclones. There is some damp weather in winter, but there are no malignant fevers, and there is little or no malaria, except in a few marshy places. There are some mosquitoes and flies,, but they are not especially troublesome, and there are no poisonous reptiles.

    The population is mostly native, five sixths white, one sixth colored. The white population is almost entirely of Anglo Saxon descent.

    "Perfect titles may be secured, but all titles everywhere should always be searched by a competent lawyer, the usual fee for which is ten to twenty dollars.

    "Farm hands receive from twenty to twenty-five dollars per month and board, for a season of nine or ten months, sometimes for the whole year. Day hands receive from seventy-five cents to two dollars per day and board themselves."

    Those who are tempted by the advertisements for fruitpickers should beware. Delaware, like some other states, allows fees to constables and to the " squires"--Justices of the Peace they would be elsewhere--for arrests, and it is a common practice to advertise for fruit pickers, then arrest them as tramps when they come, and the next day release them on condition that they will leave the county at once--and leave the trap open for the next comer.

    Delaware peaches have made fortunes for many, but will make still greater fortunes in the future for the owners of the land.

    Pears, plums, grapes, watermelons, and cantaloupes thrive, and find an ideal home, and small fruits all flourish. Sweet potatoes yield bountifully and are of the finest quality. Asparagus and early white potatoes pay handsome profits. Tomatoes, the great canning crop, are grown by the thousands of acres.

    "The grasses and clovers grow in luxuriance, and hence dairying and beef production are profitable. Poultry pays as well as anywhere else; chickens often run on green clover all through the open winter.

    "The game consists of various species of ducks, quails, reed birds, hares, marsh rabbits, and other small creatures. Shad, trout, herring, crocus, black bass, pike, white fish, rock fish, oysters, clams, crabs, and terrapin are abundant in Delaware waters."

    The tax in the rural counties is generally sixty cents on the hundred dollars. Besides this there are taxes on business and a very light school tax. There is no state tax, yet the state makes large appropriations for the support of the public schools, which are free to everybody.

    Maryland has established a State Bureau of Immigration in Baltimore to give information to home seekers, and advise them as to choice of location, opportunities for getting started in agricultural production, and aid them in any way consistent with a State Bureau. Most of these facts are taken from such reports.

    Southern Maryland and the eastern shore are especially adapted to gardening and trucking, as well as fruit growing. Land is cheap and can be purchased in tracts of any size from an acre upwards, at from ten to fifty dollars per acre. Farms from twenty acres to seven hundred acres and up are for sale in nearly every county in the state. The removal of a large part of the negro population from the country to the cities has resulted in the partition of the large estates into smaller farms, thus affording an opportunity for home seekers who are seeking cheap land amid congenial surroundings. Nearly all of these farms have buildings, some in need of repair, others in very good condition.

    For those who wish to avoid the hard work of breaking woodlands, the eastern and western shores offer abundant well-cultivated lands with buildings, orchards, and woods, in the immediate vicinity of navigable rivers and railways, on good roads at from twenty dollars per acre upwards. That seems cheap.

    For settlers who are accustomed to mountainous regions, western Maryland has land for sale at even cheaper rates.

    "There are many large tidal marshes in Maryland, as might be expected in a territory watered like this state. They are of the richest soil to be found, because the Chesapeake Bay is a great river valley, receiving the drainage of a vast area of fertile land, comprising nearly one third of New York and nearly all of the great agricultural states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Every year this drainage brings down a black sediment, called oyster mud, which is deposited on the marshlands and enriches the soil, making it, with proper cultivation, of productivity like that of the rice and wheat fields of Egypt. These unreclaimed lands are used chiefly for grain."

    Proper drainage of small tracts of this land would bring unsurpassed and absolutely untouched fertility.

    The Chesapeake River valley is not so large as that of the Nile or Ganges, but is of enough consequence to play an important part in human affairs and to support in comfort and prosperity a population as large as that of many famous states.

    "The eastern shore is uniformly level, with good roads. The proximity of the ocean and the bay greatly modifies the temperature. It has a great trunk railway, with connections along its entire length, called the Delaware Division of the Pennsylvania railroad, which furnishes direct transportation to Philadelphia, New York, and other northern cities."

    "On the eastern shore there are many thousand acres of land devoted to garden truck, and the strawberry crop has of late years become of importance. Over one hundred carloads of strawberries are shipped daily during the season to the Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston markets."

    Land properly cultivated will yield four thousand quarts of strawberries to an acre.

    The canning of various fruits and vegetables has grown to be larger than that of any other state and is one of the most profitable of the industries of Maryland. The principal articles canned are peaches, peas, and tomatoes.

    The tomato crop is also profitable to the grower. The young plants are set out in the spring; many do this with a machine, but two persons can easily plant seven acres in a day by hand.

    An acre will produce from six to eighteen tons of tomatoes, according to the quality of the soil. All such products bring better prices now in Maryland markets than they did before canning was resorted to. The Maryland tin can is known wherever civilization reaches.

    Tobacco is extensively produced only in southern Maryland, although it can be raised in any section of the state.

    In the neighborhood of the larger cities trucking and fruit growing are profitable, combined with poultry raising, often on farms of not more than five or ten acres.

    Many farmers devote part of their time successfully to bees, and there is nowhere a better climate for flowrs than that of Maryland. Two English florists who have settled in Baltimore County, ten and thirteen miles northeast of the city, daily send to all parts of the United States and even to Canada many large boxes of beautiful roses, carnations, violets, and other choice flowers. Both of these men began on a small scale and have prospered.

    The farmer who has a couple of thousand dollars to pay cash for a small farm in Maryland is assured of a good living. But also a less favored settler, if he has only from four to eight hundred dollars, can have a good start in Maryland, and probably as good a chance for independence and prosperity as anywhere.

    Families of immigrants when traveling to the Western, Northwestern, and Southern states of America have to spend from one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars for railroad tickets from New York to their destination; by going to these adjoining states they can save all that money, and invest it in land.

    The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Immigration also publishes information for the home seeker.

    To most people the name Virginia carries with it limitless vistas of tobacco fields covered with darkies plying the hoe, or picking off the ubiquitous worm. Before the War this picture would have been a true one; but since the awakening of the younger generation to a better understanding of her resources, together with the withdrawal of large numbers of the colored people into industrial occupations, no state offers more attractive inducements to the homecrofter than Virginia. In climate, diversity of soils, fruits, forests, water supply, mineral deposits, including mountain and valley, she offers unsurpassed advantages. Truly did Captain John Smith, the adventurous father of Virginia, suggest that "Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation."

    Virginia lies between the extremes of heat and cold, removed alike from the sultry, protracted summers of the more southern states, and the longer winters and devastating storm and cyclones of the North and Northwest. Its limits north and south correspond to California and southern Europe.

    The climate is mild and healthful. The winters are less severe than in the Northern and Northwestern states, or even the western localities of the same latitude, while the occasional periods of extreme heat in the summer are not more oppressive than in many portions of the North.

    Tidewater Virginia, or the Coastal Plain, as it is sometimes called, receives the name from the fact that the streams that penetrate it feel the ebb and flow of the tides from the ocean up to the head of navigation. It consists chiefly of broad and level plains, while a considerable portion, nearest to the bay, has shallow bays and estuaries, and marshes that are in most instances reached only by the ocean tides. These marshes abound with wild duck and sora. Tidewater is mainly an alluvial country. The soil is chiefly light, sandy loam, underlaid with clay. Its principal productions are fruits and early vegetables, which are raised in extensive "market gardens," and shipped in large quantities to Northern cities. The fertilizing minerals--gypsum, marl, and greensand--abound, and their judicious use readily restores the lands when exhausted by improvident cultivation.

    Middle Virginia is a wide, undulating plain, crossed by many rivers that have cut their channels to a considerable depth and are bordered by alluvial bottom lands that are very productive. The soil consists of clays with a subsoil of disintegrated sandstone rocks, and varies according to the nature of the rock from which it is formed.

    The principal productions of middle Virginia are corn, wheat, oats, and tobacco. The tobacco raised in this section and in Piedmont, known as the "Virginia Leaf," is the best grown and the best known in the United States. In this section, as in Tidewater, the low bottom lands formed by the sediment of the waters are exceptionally productive.

    The Piedmont section is diversified and surpassingly picturesque. The soil is heavier than that of middle Virginia, the subsoil being of stiff and dark red clay. On the slopes of the Blue Ridge grapes of delicious flavor grow luxuriantly. These produce excellent wines, and the clarets have a wide fame. The pippin apples of this section are of unrivaled excellence.

    The "Great Valley," as it is descriptively called, is in the general configuration one continuous valley, included between the two mountain chains that extend throughout the state; it is one of the most abundantly watered regions on the face of the globe. Deep limestone beds form the floor of the Great Valley, and from these beds the soil derives an exceeding fertility, peculiarly adapted to the growth of grasses and grain, and it bears the name of the "garden spot" of the state.

    Five trunk lines of railroads penetrate and intersect the state. The lines of steamboats that ply the navigable streams of eastern Virginia afford commercial communication for large sections of the state with the markets of this country and of Europe. Norfolk and Newport News maintain communication with the European markets by steamers and vessels, while from these ports is also kept up an extensive commerce along the Atlantic seaboard. The seaports are nearer than is New York to the great centers of population, and areas of production, of the West and Northwest.

    Market garden crops of every description can be grown. The following result was obtained on a four-acre patch near Norfolk:

    "The owner stated that in September he sowed spinach on four acres. Between Christmas and the first of March folIowing he cut and sold the spinach at the rate of one hundred barrels to the acre, at a price ranging from two to seven dollars per barrel--an average of $4.50 per barrel. Early in March the four acres were set out to lettuce, setting the plants in the open air with no protection whatever, 175,000 plants on the four acres. He shipped 450 half-barrel baskets of lettuce to the acre, at a price ranging from $2 to $2.75 per basket.

    "Early in April, just before the lettuce was ready to ship, he planted snap beans between the lettuce rows; and today, June 2d, these are the finest beans we have seen this season.

    "The last week in May he planted cantaloupes between the bean rows, which, when marketed in July, will make four crops from the same land in one year's time. The cantaloupes will be good for 250 crates to the acre, and the price will run from $1 to $1.50 per crate. A careful investigation of these 'facts, figures, and features' will show that his gross sales will easily reach $2000 per acre; his net profits depend largely upon the man and the management; but they surely should not be less than $1000 clear, clean profit to the acre."

    "This is for farming done all out of doors. No hothouse or hotbed work--not a bit of it, with no extra expense for hotbeds, cold frames, or hothouses."

    "Intensive," thorough tillage and care of the soil will probably pay as well here as at any point in the United States.

    Apples are the principal fruit crop of the state. There is a yearly increasing number of trees. In one of the valley counties a seventeen-year-old orchard of 1150 trees produced an apple crop as far back as 1905 which brought the owner $10,000, another of fifty twenty-year-old trees brought $700. Mr. H. E. Vandeman, one of the best-known horticulturists in the country, says that there is not in all North America a better place to plant orchards than in Virginia; on account of its "rich apple soil, good flavor and keeping qualities of the fruit, and nearness to the great markets of the East and Europe."

    The trees attain a fine size and live to a good old age, and produce abundantly. In Patrick County there is a tree nine feet five inches around which has borne 110 bushels of apples at a single crop; other trees have borne even more. One farmer in Albemarle County has received more than $15,000 for a single crop of Albemarle Pippins grown on twenty acres of land. This pippin is considered the most delicious apple in the world.

    The fig, pomegranate, and other delicate fruits flourish in the Tidewater region.

    New England, from Maine to Rhode Island, is suffering from one disease--lack of intelligent labor. Thirty years ago the sons and daughters who, in the natural course of events, would have stayed to cultivate the home acres, left to form a part of the westward throng making for the level, untouched prairies of Illinois and Iowa.

    The old folks have died or become incapacitated. New interests chain their children to adopted homes. Result,--unoccupied lands by the hundred thousand acres, awaiting energy, skill, and faith.

    Ten dollars an acre is a common price for the rocky hills of New England. The choice river bottoms, and land near the larger cities is as high priced as similar land anywhere else. Intending settlers can buy small areas for little money; usually the smallest farms have good buildings worth in many cases more than the price asked for the whole farm. Climatic conditions are not favorable to single cropping. In the old days general farming, grain, beef, sheep, and hogs were the rule; nowadays, special crops, dairying, fruit growing, etc.

    Tobacco is the great staple in the rich Connecticut River bottoms, and even on the uplands, if properly manured, it pays from one to three hundred dollars per acre. Tobacco can be raised on small areas far from the railroad, as, when properly cured and packed for shipment, it is not perishable. To many the worst feature of New England is the climate --long, cold winters and short summers. Maine being farthest north suffers most in this respect, but that does not prevent her producing hundreds of thousands of tons of sweet corn for canning and vast quantities of eggs and butter. Fruit does well on the lower coast; a small orchard of peaches or plums will in three or four years from planting make a comfortable living. Bush fruits grow in abundance and give never-failing crops.

    Poultry is peculiarly successful on the rocky hills, because they are nearly always dry or well drained. Dairying can be made to pay if near a creamery, or where milk can be sold at retail. The prospective settler here should bear in mind that wherever he goes, the first year will produce little more than a kitchen garden; the second enable him barely to pull through, and the third give him a start at a permanent income. In farming, as in all other businesses, only those will succeed who know what they want and how to get it; who have selected with care the locality best suited to the special crops they intend to raise; and after having once made a selection, stick until they have compelled success.

    The lure of the vast West and of the new South is not forgotten; but the time has passed when the young man could go West to take a farm of Uncle Sam's. Desirable land is too expensive for the pioneer, and the constant toil and comparative isolation of the prairie farm offers but a poor sort of liberty, though it still affords a living.

    But close to the growing towns in those states small plots of land can still be had to work with the same bright prospects that are offered near the great metropolis.

    In nearly all the sections within the area of intensive cultivation, timber is still plentiful enough to make it the cheapest building material; and persons who really want to get to the land can contrive a sufficient shelter, like a pioneer's, for from two to five hundred dollars.

    


CHAPTER XVIII

CLEARING THE LAND


    It is pretty good fun to hack at bushes and to chop trees down and then to chop them up. If there is only a small part of the land to be cleared, a man can easily learn skill with the ax and do it at odd times, but he was a wise old man of whom his little girl said, "When grandpa wants anything, that moment he wants it." It is now that we need the land; but even if it is covered with trees, there is no cause for discouragement. Lumber is so high that the local or portable sawmill men will buy the timber by the acre. They will cut the trees and haul the logs.

    If you decide to cut a tree yourself, a little inquiry will show for what purpose it will bring the highest price. Locust sticks, for example, four to six inches thick, will bring in New York ten or fifteen cents a running foot for insulator pinions. If a maple proves to be either "curly" or "bird'seye" (this depending not on the variety, but on the accidental undulations of the fiber), it will be in demand for the manufacture of furniture.

    Sugar maples ten or fifteen feet high can be transplanted or sold. Nut and fruit trees will nearly always be worth keeping.

    Cedar sticks fourteen feet long will bring twenty cents in most places for hop and bean poles. See what can be sold instead of burned, and don't cut down recklessly; an unsalable tree may be valuable as a windbreak or as shade for your house. The wrong tree for shade is the dense foliaged, low-branched tree which forms a solid dome from the ground up. The right tree, in the opinion of Henry Hicks (in Country Life in America), is the American elm, which ought to be called the umbrella tree. Pliny speaks of the plane tree, our sycamore or buttonwood, as excellent, because of the horizontal branches which, like window blinds, allow free passage of the breezes while intercepting the heat of the sun.

    The ideal shade tree is a canopy like a parasol over the house, with high, leafy branches that do not shut off light and air from the windows. This cools a house by keeping the sun off and cools the air by the rapid evaporation from its leaves, and will make it ten to fifteen degrees cooler in summer. It will be cheaper and more effective than a combination of awnings, piazza, and eaves. Woodman, spare that tree.

    Stumps may be burned out To get a good draught, bore a hole in a slanting direction far down among the roots. The smoke goes through the hole first and then the flame, boring the body to the roots deep enough to plow. Land can also be cleared by dynamite. We condense from Edith Loring Fullerton in Farming, on what has been done.

    To go into the desolate, uncultivated, burned over "waste lands" near a great city and put ten acres under cultivation in the shortest possible space of time was our problem. We undertook it at short notice in an uncertain season--the autumn--with the determination to get at least a portion of the land seeded down to winter rye before cold weather prohibited further work.

    United to this problem was that of working a small farm to its utmost capacity rather than half cultivation of a large one, which is difficult to handle from lack of time and labor and an unwise proposition for the East under the most favorable circumstances.

    Ten acres of scraggy-looking woodland was purchased, sixty-eight miles from New York City on the north shore of Long Island. The plot had a few second and third growth oak and chestnut trees and "sprouts" along the borders. All else had been burned, and the center of the acreage exhibited the mangled and blackened remains of a once thrifty woodland.

    We proceeded to choose as our helpers native Long Islanders whom we were desirous of allowing to work. We succeeded by strenuous efforts in getting together a "gang" of both colored and white men to the stupendous number of eight. They fell to work with a right good will, at first cutting down here and trimming up there as directed. However, after giving them a fair trial, we decided that they must be replaced by Italians. The question of housing the eighteen Italians soon came up. Tents might be adopted or even the unsanitary "dugout" be allowed to mar the landscape. A shanty was entirely too ugly to suit our tastes, and also expensive, and useless when the men were through with it. Tents were too airy, as we knew the work would continue until freezing weather, and perhaps well into the winter. We "passed" on the "dugout." The ideal was something that would be of use after the work of clearing was completed, and for that purpose we decided upon "condemned freight cars." They cost but ten dollars each, the railroad being glad to get rid of them. We bought two, ultimately using one for a chicken house and the other as a barn. In the meantime it was decided to remove the stumps by dynamite, as trying to yank them out by stump pullers or by mattock and plow was both slow and brutal. The ordinary custom of allowing nature to work six years at the stumps and gradually eliminate them by decay was not to be thought of.

    Dynamiter Kissam, a Long Island expert, arrived and set to work, using fuses for small stumps up to two feet in diameter.

    With the advent of the Italians work began in earnest; they cleared out every useless tree, cutting cord wood where any could be obtained and burning the branches and charred trees as they went. They also cleared out all underbrush thoroughly.

    The dynamiter with his helper followed them up. This is the most exciting and interesting part of clearing land by modern methods.

    The dynamite is put up in half-pound sticks. They are a little larger than an ordinary candle and are wrapped in heavy yellow paraffined paper. One folded end of this paper is opened up and a hole made by a wooden skewer into the dynamite stick, which is plastic and resembles graham bread in color and consistency.

    For magneto-battery work where several charges are required, a copper cap in which is a minute quantity of fulminate of mercury, and which is exploded by a spark, is attached to fine electric wires and sealed by sulphur. This cap is placed in holes in the sticks of dynamite, and then securely tied by drawing string tightly around the paper which is raised to admit the cap.

    In preparing a charge for fuse ignition, the cap is crimped to the end of a piece of mining fuse and this is inserted in the dynamite stick and securely fastened as previously described.

    These prepared charges are placed in a basket and carried very tenderly to the stumps which have been prepared by the dynamiter's assistant. All the work is handled very carefully, for while there is not much danger of an accident unless fire is placed near the explosive, nevertheless extreme caution is used at all times. It requires a nature serene, calm, and deliberate.

    Deep oblique holes were then made with a round crowbar under the stump singled out for execution. This hole should be as nearly horizontal as possible and directly under the stump so that all the explosive force may be expended on the wood and not on the earth between the dynamite and the stump. The earth acts as a cushion and the natural tendency of dynamite to exert force downward is counteracted.

    As soon as a small strip was blown, the Italians, gathering up all the stumps, roots, and fragments, removing any pieces that were loosened but not completely torn out, and piling them at intervals, immediately burned them. This cannot be done when stumps are removed by any other method, for by the digging process the earth must be picked and scraped from them and ultimately the stump hacked in pieces before it will burn.

    By our method the stump is burned and the finest kind of unleached wood ashes--containing lime to "sweeten" and potash and phosphoric acid to furnish plant food--are spread upon the ground a few hours after the stumps are blown out. These ashes would under other circumstances have to be purchased at a cost of perhaps two dollars a barrel, and as five barrels at least to the acre are required for good fertilization, these ashes gave us the first credit upon the books.

    Following the burners came the manure spreaders; five carloads of manure had been purchased and was delivered before it was needed. When the manure was spread upon the land (one half carload to the acre), the plow started its work smoothly and with none of the strain and jerk on man and beast usual in new land. The soil was turned over with the greatest ease, for the explosions had shivered and torn out even the smallest roots, so the plow ran through the ground much more easily than in sod land.

    Our friable, sandy loam, with a light admixture of clay, pulverized and aerated by the explosions, was in market garden condition at once and without the year's loss of crops assured by old methods.

    A tooth harrow was next run over the plowed section, and gleaners followed the harrow, picking up the fine roots as they were brought to the surface. As piles of these fine roots grew, they were burned and the ashes immediately spread upon the land. The tooth harrow was run again across the rows, the disk harrow following chopped and pulverized the earth into the finest possible condition. Thirty five and one half working days after Larry and his gang arrived, rye was drilled into three and one half acres.

    The condemned freight cars were placed upon skids and drawn to the desired position over soaped planks. They were raised from the ground to give good under ventilation. The north and east sides are filled or banked up with sand which came out of the well. This keeps out the cold winds, and, in the case of the chicken-house car, allows the fowls a shaded shelter on hot summer days.

    The chicken-house car was placed facing the southeast. The western end has a large glazed sash placed on it, and two in the southern side. One half the car was partitioned off for roosting quarters, while the other half serves as a laying and scratching house. This farm keeps only a few chickens for family use.

    The artesian well was started in October. The well was, naturally, a necessity, but there was much to be considered in regard to the method of pumping. Under ordinary circumstances a windmill would do, and is generally a good auxiliary; a ten-foot iron tower and a ten-foot fan wheel cost about fifty dollars, but our farm is not to be allowed to be a failure for lack of water in a dry season. In case of drought (and every summer brings one of greater or less duration) water must be on hand, and as a drought usually is accompanied by windless weather, the windmill could not be depended upon. An engine was obviously necessary. Both gasoline and kerosene engines were closely investigated, with the result that a kerosene oil engine was decided upon. (The new style of heavy oil engine is better and cheaper to run. Ed.) An advantage of the engine over a windmill is that it will furnish power for cutting wood, grinding grain, or lighting the buildings, a two and one half horsepower engine running twenty-five 16 c.p. lights easily.

    The rye was turned under green in the spring to furnish humus, the greatest and only vital need of this particular spot of virgin soil.

    Since that was written an excellent and cheap stump puller has been introduced, but the account of work is still typical. Dynamiting is still the modern way to clear land as well as to break up a stiff subsoil or hardpan, so as to loosen the earth to let deep roots like trees or alfalfa go down and to secure drainage.

    Primitive American man regarded trees as "lumber" instead of as timber and still destroys countless millions in valuable wood as he "clears the ground."

    After it is cleared, it is vital to keep it cleared of weeds, which worse garroters of crops than trees. To do that we don't need to bow to the Earth, nor to hammer her with a hand hoe.

    "The Man with the Hoe" began to be a back number when Arkwright invented the ark or the mule or whatever he did invent. The man with the wheel hoe is the man that is "It." A wheel hoe costs from $6 to $12, and will do the work of several men without breaking the heart or even the back of one of them. It has as many attachments as a summer girl and is equally versatile. It must be run between the rows as soon as the ground is dry after every rain, so as to slay the weeds before they are born. If you don't they will slay your profits, if not yourself.

    Crops grown on that experimental farm are: Asparagus, berries, beans, beets, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, carrots, cucumbers, corn, eggplant, endive, fruit trees, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, limes, melons, martynias, onions, okra, parsley, parsnips, peas, potatoes (sweet and white), pumpkins, radishes, rhubarb, salsify, squash, tomatoes, etc. Marketed strictly choice radishes May 18, peas June 10, lettuce June 21, beans June 29, beets July 8, carrots July 10, cabbage July 11. Surely a rapid result.

    Hemp is hardly worth your growing for itself under ordinary circumstances; the returns per acre are not sufficient. But Charles Richard Dodge, in one of the United States Yearbooks of the Department of Agriculture, says that as a weed killer it has practically no equal.

    In proof of this, a North River farmer stated that thistles heretofore had mastered him in a certain field, but after sowing it with hemp not a thistle survived; and while ridding the land of this pest, the hemp yielded him nearly sixty dollars an acre, where previously nothing valuable could be produced.

    As it grows from Minnesota to the Mississippi Delta, its value for this purpose is considerable.

    But there is a way easier and cheaper of clearing land than by blasting, if we can afford to wait a little; and Mr. George Fayette Thompson, in Bulletin No. 27, Bureau of Animal Industry, tells us how, giving some interesting facts about Angora goats, of which the following is a condensation:

    To people taking up raw land, particularly where there is a heavy undergrowth to be cleared away, goats of some kind are an invaluable aid. In its browsing qualities the common goat is as good as any, but, aside from the clearing of the land, the profit in his keep is very little, though some demand is growing up for goat's milk for infants and for some fancy cheeses. A much better animal from the standpoint of profit, while in use as a scavenger, is the Angora goat. Their long, silky hair has been used for centuries in making blankets, lap robes, rugs, carpets, and particularly the "cashmere" shawls, formerly a great luxury in this country. Much of the camel's hair dress goods is in reality made from the hair of the Angora goat, or mohair, as it is called. Angora goats thrive best in high altitudes with dry climates. They exist in greatest number in the United States in California, New Mexico, and Texas. They have been used successfully in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to eat the underbrush off the land, doing for nothing that for which the farmers pay Chinese laborers twenty-five to forty dollars per acre. The cost of Angora goats is about ten to thirty dollars each for does, with bucks at fifty to two hundred dollars, so that even with a small area of land to clear it would pay to buy a little flock for that purpose. Dr. Shandley, of Iowa, says that two to three goats to the acre is sufficient for cleaning up land, and that in two years the goats will eat all of the underbrush from woodland, such as briers, thistles, scrub oak, sumac, and, in fact, any shrub undergrowth. They need no other food than what they can secure from the woods themselves. Consequently, the income from the sale of mohair is nearly net.

    The more nearly thoroughbred the goats are, the better the mohair and the higher the price. The meat of the Angora goat is superior to mutton, although if sold in the market under the name of goat meat, it commands only half the price of mutton.

    As an example of the Angora's utility in cleaning up land, the Country Gentleman says: "Mr. Landrum exhibited ten head at the Oregon State Fair. In order to demonstrate their effectiveness as substitutes for grubbing, he left them on three acres of brush. At the end of the second year the land was mellow and ready for the plow."

    It might be possible to build up a business in clearing lands for others by means of a herd of Angoras.

    


CHAPTER XIX

HOW TO BUILD


    If you find an "abandoned farm" on which the buildings are worth more than the whole price asked, as frequently happens, you are all right. Even if the buildings are somewhat dilapidated, you can fix them up for a few dollars. But in buying small plots of ground, larger farms have to be broken up. If you buy from the resident owner, he may sell you five acres off his larger tract, and keep his house to live in. Certain it is that if a farm of 100 acres is subdivided into twenty five-acre farms, at least nineteen new houses must be built, although sometimes an old barn can be made into a fair residence.

    If you can do no better, it is possible to start by tenting. An outfit large enough for a family of six would be about as follows:

    1 wall tent with fly, 10 X 14, for sleeping 1 wall tent with fly, 10 X 14, for dining

    1 old cook stove (to be erected outdoors), 2 floors, 10 X 14, at $5 each

    Brown tents, at least for the sleeping rooms, are best; they last longer, are cooler, and do not attract the flies; though indeed we need not have house flies if we keep the horse manure covered up--they are all bred in that. If the tents are in the shade, the cost of the cover or fly can be saved in the dining tent; but it is necessary in the living tent, because wet canvas will leak when touched on the inside. To make the tent warm for the winter, we must bank up to the edges of the platform with earth and cover the whole with another tent of the same shape, but a foot larger in every dimension. These are commonly used in Montana.

    It is to be presumed that no one would attempt moving in without household utensils, which may be as simple or elaborate as you please. If there is a sawmill in the vicinity, a temporary shack for winter, say 22 X 30 feet, could be built for from $400 to $600, depending on the interior finish. Partitions can be made very cheap by erecting panels covered with canvas, burlap, old carpet, etc. Such a building does not need to be plastered, but can be made warm enough by an inside covering of burlap, heavy builders' paper, or composition board. Tar paper laid over solid sheeting makes a roof that will last for two or three years. For such a shack draw the plans yourself. All you really need is a living room, bedroom, and kitchen.

    A cheap and effective water supply can be gotten from a driven well, which in most places costs about one dollar per foot. Have it where the kitchen is to be, so that the water can be pumped into a barrel or other tank over the stove. With a good range you can have as good a supply of hot and cold water as you had in the city.

    If so fortunate as to find a piece of land with a good spring on it, you can lay pipes and draw the water from that. If you can get twelve or fifteen feet fall from the spring to the kitchen, you don't need a pump at all.

    For a toilet closet, build a shed four feet wide, six feet long, and eight feet high. Use a movable pail or box. Lime slaked or unslaked or dry dust or ashes must be scattered every time the closet is used. Always clean before it shows signs of becoming offensive: keep it covered fly tight and mix the contents with earth or litter, and scatter on the garden.

    A shack can be built of logs which will do for comfort and will look dignified.

    Horace L. Pike, in Country Life in America, says: "The lot on which we meant to build our log house stood thirty-five feet above the lake. The problem was how to build a cabin roomy, picturesque, inexpensive, and all on the ground.

    "The ground dimensions are thirty-two by thirty feet outside. This gives a living room sixteen by fourteen; bedrooms twelve by twelve, twelve by ten, and nine by seven; kitchen eleven by nine; a five- by four-foot corner for a pantry and refrigerator; closet four by six, front porch sixteen by six feet six inches, and rear porch five by five--705 square feet of inside floor space and 130 square feet of porch.

    "A dozen pine trees stand on the lot, and maneuvering was required to set a cottage among them without the crime of cutting one. The front received the salutes of a leaning oak, the life of which was saved by the sacrifice of six inches from the porch eaves, the trunk forming a newel post for the step railing.

    "We closed the contract immediately for 120 Norway or red pine logs, thirty feet long and eight by ten inches diameter at butts. The price was low--one or two dollars their like should have brought. We used, however, only eighty-one logs; forty thirty-foot, fourteen eighteen-foot, thirteen sixteen-foot, and fourteen fourteen-foot.

    "Work was begun on April 22. Two days sufficed for the owner and one man to clear and level the ground, dig post holes, set posts, and square the foundation. The soil was light sand with a clay hardpan three feet down.

    "Twenty-seven days each were put in by two men from start to finish, with assistance rendered by the owner. There were seven days by the mason, eight by carpenters, and four teen and one half by other labor. On June 4 the cabin was ready for occupancy, and the family moved in. The prices, as in most cases cited, are higher to-day. Cheaper transportation or lower tariff may reduce them again.

    "Making allowances for increased cost of logs and differences in any of the material cost, this cabin can be duplicated for less than $700 by any one who has the ground, a few tools, and some building ability. It is compact, convenient, and more roomy than a superficial glance reveals, and it can be occupied (slight care is required) from April to November with only the kitchen stove and the fireplace supplying the heat. The same plan can be used for an all-frame structure, perhaps at less cost. It could be sheathed and slab covered in a locality where slabs, edged to six or eight inches wide, could be had; or slabs could be used perpendicularly in the gable ends and on the outside of the rear extension."

    We must not overlook the differences in cost of lumber and labor in different places, sometimes more than doubling nor the fact that different contractors will vary often twenty-five per cent in their bids.

    A mere cabin, like a wooden tent, 12 X 10 with a platform adjoining, will accommodate one or even two persons and can be built by a contractor even at war prices for about fifty to one hundred dollars. This will serve for tool house or storeroom when a more convenient residence can be afforded. A number of such can be seen at "Free Acres," New Jersey, an hour from New York City on the D. L. & W. Railroad.

    Thoughtful provision and planning will go far to reduce costs. A stove pipe which should run up inside the house, not outside, so as to conserve heat and fuel, serves as chimney and fireplace. A Franklin stove, practically an open fireplace set out entirely inside the house, is a practical device, though it costs from $18 to $30. It gives a cheerful open fire to burn wood or coal and has a flat top to keep things hot, a clutch oven of sheet iron, and a bob can be attached to the front of the grate.

    But remember that though you may have trees or fallen wood for the cutting it takes a lot of time to cut it. A cylindrical self-feeding coal burner is most economical for heating and a lined sheet iron cooking stove for the kitchen.

    A fireless cooker, which retains the heat all day by means of soapstone or insulation and slowly cooks the food without losing the juices, is an economical device. It can be made at home by copying what you see in the stores or by getting directions from the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

    Don't forget double windows at least toward the north; and on all windows have heavy holland shades which make an air space between the cold windowpanes and the atmosphere of the room.

    Portable houses sound attractive, but they do not pay unless you will need to move them. Manifestly it costs more to make a house like a trunk than like a shed. The houses shipped ready made of the "Aladdin" type, with all the parts ready marked to be nailed together by unskilled labor are a much better investment and are not shaky.

    It is true that living is expensive in the train suburbs, when almost all that is eaten comes from the city, with freight and monopoly rates added. But one can raise most of what the family eats, and save besides in car fares and doctor's bills.

    The rent, perhaps a quarter of the income, that was paid for a place so small that the cat had to jump on a chair when the baby sat down, will be a clear gain.

    Mrs. Warrington's cottage at Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, forms a very interesting subject, and is built from designs of well-known architects of Philadelphia, who have taken up building small, inexpensive modern houses in a practical manner. The house is built with a stone foundation and a wooden superstructure with exterior walls covered with metal lath and cement stucco which is stained a cream color. The trimmings are stained a soft brown and the sashes are painted white. The roof is covered with shingles, and is left to weather finish. The front porch, from which a vestibule leads into the house, has a hooded cover formed by the main roof sweeping down sufficiently to form a protect tion. The vestibule forms an entrance to both the living room and the kitchen; the kitchen is at the front of the house, allowing the main rooms and a private porch to be at the south side. The interior throughout is trimmed with cypress and stained a soft brown. The second floor joists are exposed to view and are stained in a similar manner, while the ceiling space between the joists is plastered. A broad archway separates the living and the dining rooms, and while it forms a separation, it does not preclude the possibility, when desired, of throwing the two rooms into one large apartment. The large, open fireplace is built of clinker brick, and its facings extend from the floor to the ceiling; it has a wooden shelf supported on corbeled brackets. A semi-boxed stairway rises out of the living room to the second floor. There are three bedrooms with good- sized closets, and a bathroom on the second floor. A cellar, under the entire house, has a cemented bottom, and contains a laun dry. This house costs about $2000 complete.

    Houses built of cement blocks are growing in favor. Cement blocks can be made anywhere by unskilled labor. All that is needed is a competent foreman to direct the making and seasoning of the blocks and laying them in the walls.

    The cost of concrete compared to frame or brick structures is, if anything, all things considered, in favor of concrete. Houses built of wood are likely to become increasingly expensive because of the deforesting which is going on in all parts of the United States.

    There are abundant books of plans and costs published, showing what may be built, and several responsible publishers recklessly offer to refund the cost of the plans if the expense of building the house exceeds their estimates.

    There are also a number of manufacturers of ready-made portable houses, running in cost from about three hundred dollars for four rooms, upward. Some of these are adapted to all-the-year-round use and may be used where land is taken experimentally.





CHAPTER XX

BACK TO THE LAND


    "Life, to the average man, means hard, anxious work, with disappointment at the end, whereas it ought to mean plenty of time for books and talk. There is something wrong about a system which condemns ninety-nine hundredths of the race to an existence as bare of intellectual activity and enjoyment as that of a horse, and with the added anxiety concerning the next month's rent. Is there no escape? Through years of hard toil I suspected that there might be such an escape. Now, having escaped, I am sure of it, so long as oatmeal is less expensive than Hour, so long as the fish and the cabbage grows, I shall keep out of the slavery of modern city existence, and live in God's sunshine." (Hubert, "Liberty and a Living.")

    The wealthy class are taking up farming as a healthy and beautifying diversion, and we may expect others to follow, as it certainly promotes happiness and adds to the attractions of those who adopt it. With the aids which science has given, a farmer can now make good profits with less labor than was formerly necessary to get a bare living. The amount that a single well-managed, well-tilled acre will produce in a season is simply incredible. This accounts for the increased demand for farming lands wherever they are to be had on reasonable terms. The wage earners are learning this, and it is only a question of a little time when manufacturing plants will have to be convenient to lands where the families of the hands can have a small tract of land to cultivate. This requires good transportation facilities from the homes to the factories.

    Corporate operation has been a great aid to human progress. Organization is man's orderly way of following the Divine Plan for his economic salvation vet the far mer has profited less by organization than trades unions. Where farmers have organized to aid each other to buy and sell, they have gained wonderfully, but a beginning in this direction has but served to show how much more is needed.

    To the individual farmer with large area and small means, the improvements in machinery that cheapen his production are not at present available. The discoveries in methods of fertilization of the soil only make it more difficult for him to earn a living in competition with those whose ample capital increases production by its use. Improvements in fruits and vegetation, by hybridization and various methods that add wealth to those of means, only add to the troubles of our present small farmers.

    Hitherto corporate operation has been mainly for the benefit of stockholders. The cases where those whose labor creates dividends get more than wages have been rare. "A living wage " has been the ambition of labor itself: all profit beyond this is supposed to be the right of capital. There is with some persons an unconscious reluctance to share profits with labor lest the laborers become independent, and thus reduce their number to an extent to raise the labor market, so that it is difficult to get fair consideration of any business proposition that promises better conditions for the producer or independence for the laborer. This is undoubtedly short sighted, as the higher intelligence of the people who have land increases production and gives enlarged opportunities for the profitable employment of money. However, if capitalists persist in this narrow view, the money of the people when they learn and think, can be applied to this purpose instead of being deposited in savings banks, where much of it is used in increasing the wealth of those who already have abundance.

    The idea of "helping others to help themselves" finds a responsive chord in the hearts of many wealthy people. But the question is, how can all be helped? No business method by which this can be accomplished has, as yet, been practically demonstrated.

    In no field does corporate operation promise more for the betterment of human conditions, for a higher standard of morals and of education, or great certainty of profit for capital, than by systematically aiding men to obtain farms.

    Progress proceeds on the line of returns for expenditure. When a man's economic condition permits, his first thought is to give his children an education and a better chance in life than he had. Those who extol the simple life as the ideal condition of happiness do not mean that want and deprivation of necessities is the ideal condition. If they did, they would put their children in that condition to make them happy. Both extremes of wealth and of poverty are burdens and retard mental and moral progress. The ideal condition is to be found on a farm where the land is paid for and ample means are at hand to supply the necessities for physical demands, with leisure to learn and enjoy those pleasures of the mind which come with knowledge of Nature's laws, and wisdom to live in harmony with them, and in a measure comprehend the purposes of creation.

    Mr. G. W. Smith, founder of the Hundred Year Club, suggests that there is an opening in intensive farming for the benevolent but canny wealthy who are interested in the soil and want to combine philanthropy and percentage.

    His plan is to get capital to secure land and all the necessary means, give to each approved applicant perpetual leases of land for a small farm and a lot in a village site convenient thereto, with a house merely sufficient for shelter, requiring as a first payment sufficient to secure capital against loss in case the farmer forfeits his contract, say $100. Let the company provide scientific supervision and conduct the operation mainly as though the farmers were employees, all the necessaries to be charged to each with only sufficient profit to pay the expense and a fair interest on the capital employed. Through a purchasing and sales department all products should be sold in the best market and each farmer credited with the net result of his productions until the agreed sale price is received, when title should pass in fee to the farmer, who, during the time, has become scientific so far as that piece of land is concerned, and in future can operate it with the advantages which progress has made. A public building would be necessary for a storehouse, in which rooms for meetings of various kinds should be provided, also such shelter as might be necessary for assembling and storage of products for shipment.

    The expense of public buildings and other utilities could be paid for out of the increased value that they bring to the land. The company should have a nursery to provide fruit tree, etc., the growth of which, with the increase of population would make the farms, when paid for, worth far more than their cost. Such opportunities as this, opened to all, would do away with the tramps who are now able to live on the charitable, only because of the known difficulties of finding work.

    The farmers should be utilized as far as possible in the purchasing and sales department, and should divide into committees to try various experiments connected with their business, that through their reports all may be benefited by the knowledge gained. Dairying and large orchards on land suitable and not of use in the general farming plan could be conducted by the community, each farmer being a stockholder. The labor performed on these cooperative undertakings should be paid for and charged to cost of production, each one who performs a share of the labor participating in the profits as near as may be. As money is received by the company from products, it can be used in similar operations. When the farms are paid for, the farmers can continue the cooperative features that experience has proved useful and extend the business principle to other fields, such as heating, light, and power by electricity, machinery for preparing products for market, drying, canning, etc., as well as for the cultivation of the soil.

    Where the land is level the farms can be laid out on a general plan that will admit of the use of steam plows to reduce the cost of plowing, save hard labor, and reduce the number of work animals.

    Among the multitude of advantages the individual would have in these communities, social, educational, and economic, health and physical development appear as not the least.

    The farm, as it is, still furnishes a horde of recruits for insane asylums; its isolation and monotony of everyday life, with its lack of social intercourse and educational advantages, nearly counterbalance the strain and poverty of the cities.

    But the greatest difficulty is the growing inability of the farmers' sons to secure land and the means to cultivate it when they arrive at a marriageable age. Those who have seen for threescore years the ever-increasing flow of boys and girls from the farms to the cities, greater in proportion to the rural population than in any other age, realize the necessity for aid in this direction. While it is true that the farm has contributed largely to the numbers of our successful city men, the fact remains that the mass of boys who come to the cities as well as the city born, lack the faculty to grab or save, and fail, while the healthy girls swell the ranks of prostitution, where an average of eight years lands them in a pauper's grave.

    Our soldiers, as well as those of other countries, are not up to former physical standards. Degeneracy, disintegration is apparent in every direction.

    The power of a nation depends on the physical and mental condition of the great mass of people, and to leave the people in ignorance that they may be controlled by the intelligent few who understand their needs and may have their welfare at heart, is a mistake that other nations than Russia have made. The law of the survival of the fittest has wiped out races and nations who have ignored this fundamental law, that all men must progress together.

    A race or civilization with such a basis of farmers as this plan would create would be enduring.

    The nation or race, like the individual, must have intelligent organization and live in harmony with the laws of nature in order to survive. Opposition to them means destruction Cooperation is constructive.

    If we are to profit by this lesson, it is necessary that we improve the conditions surrounding our lower classes. That this is recognized by a large number of leading minds is proved by the efforts of the many who are engaged in educational and other social movements, most of which result in little net good to the wage-earners.

    Obstacles to small farming near large cities are that farms of three to ten acres with buildings are not plentiful, and that mortgage loans are hard to get in the East and loans to help in building are hardly to be had at all.

    Land is either held intact as large farms or is sold entire to speculators who hold it until it can be divided into city lots. Here, it would seem, is an opportunity for those who are interested in bettering the condition of their fellow men by wholesale, and can invest large capital, but little time, in the work.

    Let them buy up land in large acreages and cut it up into small plots of from one to ten acres, charging enough advance to return interest on the money invested and to meet the necessary expenses in such operation. Then make liberal building loans to buyers. Inquiries among real estate men show that they always have a larger demand for small acreage than they can meet, so an immediate market with large profits would await those who are first in this field.

    There is no use in blaming people for not leaving the cities to go to the farms; they don't know enough to go, they don't know enough to make a living if they do go, and they don't know enough to enjoy it. Besides this, they have not the capital. We must teach them and help them.

    George H. Maxwell's Homecrofters' Guild at Watertown, Mass., where boys are taught what to do with the earth and how to do it, is worth whole shelves of books on " The Exodus to the Cities" or the "Prosperity of the Settler."

    It is reported that the state of Texas offered six million acres of land for sale to settlers, at one dollar per acre. It has been suggested that it would be better that the states should rent out the land at four per cent of the sale price. This would leave more money in the hands of settlers and enable many to get farms who cannot pay the price and have enough left to raise a crop. In reality it would be better for the state to help farmers get a start rather than to tax them one dollar per acre to begin with. However, under our system of government, we permit only those who have money to have land.

    There can be no doubt that the state of Texas and her people would be better off if the land were leased than to have it sold. Probably a tax on the value of the land instead of a rent would be the best for all the people, especially as it would check speculation.