One Thousand Ways to Make Money by Page Fox

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