Retiring from Business CHAPTER 8.
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MODEL FARMING.
The beautiful country place, situated in New Jersey, some five or six miles from New York, and but a short distance from the majestic Hudson, was purchased by Mr. Franklin for twenty-five thousand dollars. Thirty acres of land a portion of it, already in a high state of cultivation, lay around the elegant mansion. There was a large garden, filled with the choicest varieties of small fruit; a young and thriving orchard, an extensive grapery, and a green house containing several hundred rare plants. All the grounds contiguous to the dwelling were laid out with taste, and ornamented with fountains, statues, walks, and arbors.
Just as nature was putting on her spring attire, the family of Mr. Franklin removed from the city. Their new house was indeed a pleasant one, and all felt that it was so. Even Florence said it was a lovely spot, and the mother, now that the change was made, often expressed herself as pleased with everything. She experienced a sense of freedom not felt in the city, and her bosom seemed to expand with a new life, as she breathed the purer air. Florence rambled about among the pleasant places which taste had provided to delight the eye, and for a few days thought it all very delightful. After that, her mind began to turn towards the city, and before two weeks elapsed, she had, on one pretense or another, visited New York half a dozen times. This was an easy matter, as the carriage went in every day.
It was not the wish of Mr. Franklin that Edwin should leave his place immediately upon his removal into the country. He thought it best to get a little under way himself, and familiar with agricultural matters, so that, to a certain extent, he would be able to give an intelligent direction to his son's efforts. But the thought of abandoning mercantile pursuits altogether, having once entered Edwin's mind, and an idea of the freedom of a country life having bewitched his imagination, he lost all interest in business, and could not be prevailed upon to continue in his clerkship, for over a few weeks after the family left the city.
To both Mr. Franklin and Edwin, the new pursuit upon which they had entered was new in every sense of the word. The father, as well as the son, looked upon it less as a business than as a pleasant kind of recreation; a sort of half work, half play affair. A practical farmer and gardener had been employed as overseer. He was an Englishman, and professed to know everything in relation to the tillage of the soil, and to be particularly at home in matters of horticulture. He also set forth that he had considerable experience as a florist. In fact, to take his own word for it, there was no other man in the country half so well-fitted for the situation he held. For his valuable services, Mr. Franklin contracted to pay him twelve hundred dollars a year. He had two sons, stout boys, who were represented to be each as good as a man on a farm. Three hundred dollars more were to be paid for the work of these two lads. A dairy, on a small scale, the overseer said must of course be established, or the model farm would not be complete. Mr. Franklin approved the suggestion, and the overseer's wife and daughter were engaged at two dollars each a week to do all things needful in the milk and butter department.
Besides the overseer, his wife, daughter, and two sons, a regular farm hand at twenty dollars a month was employed. The wages paid to these model farmers and dairy maids — six in all — amounted to within a fraction of two thousand dollars. Add the cost of their board to this sum, and the gross amount would not fall very far short of three thousand dollars per annum, as the cost, in wages, necessary to conduct Mr. Franklin's agricultural experiments. In addition to this sum were the regular expenses of the family, which, for the past two or three years, had been over four thousand dollars, and would be fully that now; and to this the interest on the sum which it took to purchase stock, and put the model farm in a state to ensure the highest success to the experiment, and we have the handsome aggregate of nine thousand dollars as the regular annual expense at which Mr. Franklin was living.
While in his regular business, Mr. Franklin had been in the habit of making close estimates. But that good habit seemed to have been entirely laid aside. He was on new ground, and unacquainted, entirely, with the way in which he was walking with too-confident steps. To his overseer, he went for all needful information, and that individual, a shrewd, not over scrupulous personage, managed him just as he thought fit. His answers, touching the productiveness of farming and horticulture, excited the most extravagant ideas. We would hardly like to say how much the thirty acres were expected to yield; but even under the heavy expense at which his experiment was conducted, Mr. Franklin confidently looked for a handsome profit!
The grounds around the mansion were five acres in extent. All this was of course unproductive. Five acres had been sown in wheat, the previous fall. The kitchen garden occupied half an acre, and the flower garden as much more. Two orchards covered an acre each; and two acres were left untilled, as a range for the cattle. Four of the remaining fifteen acres were put down in potatoes, five left for grass, four planted in corn, two in carrots and other root crops.
The season proved a good one. Everything grew luxuriantly. And it would have been strange, if such had not been the case, for, under the overseer's direction, the land had been covered with various fertilizing agents, at a cost nearly equal to the price all the products could possibly yield.
Deeply interested in his new employment, Mr. Franklin was moving about his farm, early and late, and entering into the spirit of everything. He took the agricultural journals, and studied them as attentively as a school-boy studies his lessons; and this, not without having occasional doubts awakened as to the correctness of some things done by his overseer. Occasionally he would say to him, that such and such an agricultural writer held such and such opinions on a certain point, at variance with the practice adopted on the "model farm." But the answer would only be an expression of contempt for all "book-farming," and a broad declaration that the man who could write such nonsense was nothing but a quack; most probably, if set down on a piece of ground by himself, could not, with his own hands, raise an onion.
Mr. Franklin listened to all this, but continued to read, and the more he read, the more his eyes were opened. By mid-summer, his doubts in regard to his overseer's plan of operations began to assume a rather respectable form, and his ideas touching the profits of farming in general, and this first year's operations in particular, to range discouragingly low.
When the five acres of wheat were harvested, and threshed out, instead of sixty or seventy bushels to the acre, as he had been led to believe would be obtained, twenty-five bushels was the product, or a hundred and twenty-five for the field, which, after the cost of harvesting, threshing, and carrying to market, returned him one hundred and twenty-five dollars.
"A beggarly account, that!" he muttered to himself, as he tossed the proceeds into a drawer of his secretary, and, with a disappointed feeling, walked out into the open air, to think a little more understandingly than at first, on the subject of agricultural returns.
The choice small fruits of the garden, strawberries, raspberries, etc, had all been consumed in the family; and the butter and cream produced at a cost of four dollars a week for the simple extraction of the milk and attention to the dairy operations, had nearly all gone, so far, in the same way. Not over twenty dollars' worth was gotten beyond the home-consumption market.
October came, with its serious face, and its matter-of-fact results. The four acres of potatoes, instead of yielding two hundred bushels to the acre, produced a hundred and twenty bushels of good tubers, which sold at forty cents. Four hundred and eighty bushels, at forty cents, gave the sum of one hundred and ninety-two dollars for the four acres of potatoes. When they were planted in the spring, potatoes were a dollar a bushel. The seed, therefore, cost eighty dollars, twenty bushels having been planted to each acre. Added to this, were fifteen loads of compost to each acre, at a dollar a load, making sixty dollars more, and clearing but fifty-two dollars of profit to pay for the cost of tillage.
The corn turned out better. Forty-five bushels were produced from each acre. Carrots and other root crops, produced abundantly, but they sold for a mere song. The product of the orchards and grapery, were very fair, but the first two or three attempts to sell, discouraged Mr. Franklin, and a greater portion of the fruit was either given away or allowed to rot.
Nine thousand dollars, it has been seen, was the expense at which Mr. Franklin was living. Added to this, six hundred dollars paid for lime, fertilizer, and composts of various kinds, during the season; five hundred more for stock, and five hundred laid out in various improvements, and the sum is swelled to ten thousand six hundred dollars.
Four thousand a year was the previous cost of living. Six thousand six hundred were therefore added to sustain the model farm experiment. And what, after all the product was sold, was the return in money? Only just six hundred dollars! The six thousand were as good as thrown into the sea. So much for the profits of amateur farming.
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