PLAN No. 761. TRY TO FEED ALL THEY GROW
A farmer who lives in northern Idaho, says:
“I came here five years ago from Montana, buying an 80-acre stump farm, with a small house and barn on it, and with a few acres of it cleaned up along Sand Creek. I paid $2,600 for this place, and it took all the money I had, except a little to buy a couple of cows and a team of horses. For the last five years my wife and I have made a living on this ranch, supporting five children, and have cleaned up the land, so that to-day we have thirty-five acres under cultivation. We made it a point to try to feed everything we grow on the place and selling it as a manufactured product.
“Last year we produced seventy-five tons of choice clover and timothy hay. The surplus timothy we sold at our barn door at about $16.00 per ton. We raised some 150 sacks of potatoes on an acre of newly cleared land and we have sold them at an average of about $1.50 per 100. We have raised about one ton of carrots, three tons of rutabagas, and about one ton of mangels, and red garden beets. The root crops we find very profitable here, and they give us a fairly well balanced ration for our milk cows, with clover hay. Our books show that our cows have averaged, summer and winter, about $18 per month each. We have milked six cows the past year. During that time we raised seventeen hogs, marketed them at a fair price, and have fed our one team of horses.
“We have a nice trout stream running through our yard, as well as a railway station a quarter of a mile away. We have refused an offer of $8,000 for our place, stock and improvements, so that we feel justified in feeling that we have done fairly well in the five years that we have lived on the stump ranch.”