I buy young hogs from my neighbors at market prices and make them into extra good country sausage that nets me twenty-five cents a pound in the city, and into hams for which I get twenty-five cents a pound, delivered.  The only pork product on which I do not make an excellent profit is lard.  I get fifteen cents a pound for it, delivered to the city customer, and it costs me almost that much to render and pack it.

At this writing storekeepers and egg buyers in my county are paying the farmer seventeen cents for his eggs.  I am getting twenty-five cents a dozen for eggs in thirty-dozen eases and twenty-nine cents a dozen in two-dozen boxes.  My prices to the city man are based upon the Water Street, Chicago, quotation for “firsts,” which, at this writing, is nineteen cents.  If this price goes up I go up; if it goes down I go down.

I got my customers by newspaper advertising—­almost exclusively.  It is a comforting belief that one satisfied customer will get you another, and that that customer will get you another, and so on, but it has not so worked out in my experience.  Out of all my customers less than twelve have become customers through the influence of friends.

My experience has taught me another thing:  That direct advertising does not pay.  By direct advertising I mean the mailing of letters and circulars to a list of names in the hope of selling something to persons whose names are on that list.

I tried it three times—­once to a list of names I bought from a dealer in such lists; once to a list that I myself compiled from the society columns of two Chicago dailies; and once to a classified list that I secured from a directory.

The results in these cases were about the same.  The net cost of each new customer that I secured by circulars and letters was $2.19.  The net cost of each new customer that I secured by newspaper advertising was fifty-four cents.

Not every city newspaper will get such results.  In my case I selected that paper in Chicago which in my judgment went into the greatest number of prosperous homes, and whose pages were kept clean of quack and swindling advertisements.  I used only the Sunday issues, because I believe the Sunday issues are most thoroughly read.

The farmer will want to use, and properly so, the classified columns of the paper for his advertising.  But he should patronize only that paper whose columns provide a classification especially for farm and food products.

I spent twelve dollars for advertising in one clean Chicago daily with a good circulation, and got three orders.  The trouble was that my advertisement went into a column headed “Business Personals,” along with a lot of manicure and massage advertising.

He on the farm who proposes to compete with the shipper, commission man and retailer for the city man’s trade should devote his efforts to producing food of a better quality than the city man is accustomed to get via the shipper-commission-man-retailer route.  Wherefore I proposed to give the city man the fattest, tenderest, juiciest, cleanest, freshest chicken he could get—­and charge him a profitable price in so doing.