"Well, for one thing, you ought to have a first-class manure spreader; it will do the work much quicker, and save you many backaches—now that you've decided to fertilize heavily. Then you should have a good power-driven corn sheller and a small mill for grinding corn meal and buckwheat flour. You also ought to have a one and a half horsepower kerosene engine, mounted on a portable hand truck."
"What would that be for?" asked Joe Williams, looking up.
"Well, you'll have a lot of places to use it—such as running the washing machine, turning the grindstone, corn sheller, or the cream separator, if the electric system breaks down, and other small jobs around the farm, where a portable engine will be very handy to save work and increase speed."
"We'll have the engines on the tractor that we can use," protested
Williams.
"That's all right, Joe," said the banker, "but it's too heavy for many of the light jobs, and it would not pay to consume the amount of kerosene and oil necessary to operate it, so I think you had better include the engine."
"All right," said Joe. "Let's have it then along with the others."
"What about your electric lighting plant, Joe, with the new buildings coming along? You ought to look out for that."
"Bettie and Bob have been looking up a lot of data on that subject and they've decided on putting in a water-driving unit. It requires more wire to bring the power up from the dam, but in the end will be cheaper as it costs nothing to operate."
"How many electric lights do you want to use?" asked Mr. Patterson.
"We've figured that we ought to have about one hundred sixty-watt lamp capacity for the complete farm; that would take care of the small motor of the vacuum cleaner and sewing machine."