The four acres yielded them something over one hundred and sixty baskets of sound corn which, as corn was then selling for fifty cents per bushel, meant that the crop was worth about forty dollars.
As near as Hiram could figure it had cost about fifteen dollars to raise the crop; therefore the profit to Mrs. Atterson was some twenty-five dollars.
Besides the profit from some of the garden crops, this was very small indeed; as Hiram said, it did not pay well enough to plant small patches of corn for them to fool with it much.
“The only way to make a good profit out of corn corn a place like this,” he said to Henry, who would not be convinced, “is to have a big drove of hogs and turn them into the field to fatten on the standing corn.”
“But that would be wasteful!” cried Henry, shocked at the suggestion.
“Big pork producers do not find it so,” returned Hiram, confidently. “Or else one wants a drove of cattle to fatten, and cuts the corn green and shreds it, blowing it into a silo.
“The idea is to get the cost of the corn crop back through the price paid by the butcher for your stock, or hogs.”
“Nobody ever did that around here,” declared young Pollock.
“And that's why nobody gets ahead very fast around here. Henry, why don't you strike out and do something new—just to surprise 'em?
“Stop selling a little tad of this, and a little tad of that off the farm and stick to the good farmer's rule: 'Never sell anything off the place that can't walk off.'”