THE STORY OF TWO BOYS AND A COW
The suggestion that the suburban home might be a money-making investment would strike the average suburbanite as ridiculous. But a few moments of careful calculation may put preconceived notions to flight and show how considerable money may be made—or saved, which is quite as important.
Some years ago a family, which included two boys of eleven and thirteen years, took a house in the outskirts of a good-sized town, about thirty minutes' ride from the city. The father was a buyer for an importing house, and absent from home for several months of each year. His salary was large, as such salaries go, but there were seven children to be raised and educated, several of them with marked abilities that needed the very best possible instruction to bring them to their highest development.
The boys spent one summer vacation at the country house of an old friend of the family and got ideas. They talked them over, went back to their friend for counsel, then turned their batteries on their parents to gain their consent to an important new enterprise.
Attached to the house was about an acre of ground, three fourths of which was old pasture grown to weeds and a tangle of brier bushes.
By promising to work for a farmer during the coming vacation the boys arranged to have the field, which they cleared and made ready, ploughed, harrowed, and marked in the most thorough fashion.
They planted it with the best variety of mid-season sweet corn. The farmer cultivated it, and the boys hoed it and kept it in almost perfect condition.
The season was very dry, but they laid a hose so as to start a stream of water into the lines between the rows of corn; then with a good pump they filled the trenches they had dug and completely irrigated the entire field.
The crop was a great success. The boys picked and sold at retail prices to private customers twelve hundred dozen ears of the finest corn raised in that section. As it averaged twenty cents a dozen, it footed up the very comfortable sum of two hundred and forty dollars with small ears and left-overs quite sufficient for the use of the family.
Two weeks from the first picking the stalks were cut and set up to cure for the cow that was really the object of their endeavour.
The friend of the family selected the cow. She was a fine, fresh, young Jersey and Alderney cross—a high-grade animal, good for quality as well as quantity of milk and cream.
There was small, well-built barn on the place, and here the cow was stabled. Cleanliness was the first, last, and intermediate law in and about the place. The boys had clothes expressly for barn wear and white aprons with long sleeves to put on when milking.
Such unusual attention to details attracted customers until the demand went far ahead of the supply.
For the first six months the cow gave, on an average, sixteen quarts a day, fourteen of which were sold to persons who came for it, thereby saving all trouble and cost of delivery. Two quarts were kept for the family.
For the next four months the sales were twelve quarts a day. Feed for the cow cost one dollar a week, besides hay and corn-stalks.
The cow was bought late in July, and by the first of August the milk trade was well established. After ten months' experience the boys made up a statement to show to their father when he returned from a trip to Europe.
| CREDIT | |
| 1,200 doz. corn at 20 cts. a doz. | $240.00 |
| Stalks | 20.00 |
| Milk, 184 days, 14 qts. at 8 cts. a qt. | 206.08 |
| Milk, 120 days, 12 qts. at 8 cts. a qt. | 115.20 |
| ———— | |
| $581.28 | |
| DEBIT | |
| 1 cow, $60.00; 1 ton hay, $18.00; feed, $40.00 | $118.00 |
| ———— | |
| Profit, cash on hand | $463.28 |
| Value of 1 cow | 60.00 |
| ———— | |
| Total assets | $523.28 |
Nelson S. Stone