A New York City avenue
block is about 200 feet long from house corner to house corner. It
has eight city lots 25 X 100 in its front; about double that space
(17-2/5 lots) makes an acre.
An ordinary one-horse cart holds twenty bushels, so then a full crop
of potatoes from that space would fill 56 carts.
To raise potatoes as an ordinary farmer raises them, requires him to
go over the ground not less than a dozen times, plowing, harrowing,
marking, planting, cultivating, three times weeding, three times for
bugs, and digging; it would pay him to go over it much oftener.
If he plants his rows of potatoes three feet apart, to allow for
horse cultivation, he has 69 rows of 200 feet each; which makes him
walk at least thirty-three miles over each acre. If he has a
twenty-acre lot in potatoes, he walks each year more than 650 miles
over the field and gets, let us say, 150 bushels of poor potatoes
per acre, or 3000 bushels off his twenty-acre field.
Now suppose he cultivates the soil, instead of just "raising a
crop," and gets 600 bushels of fine potatoes to the acre, he need
plant only five acres, walk only 200 miles, and, because his
potatoes are choice and early, get many times the price that his
pedestrian neighbor gets.
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