We know already that the natural and healthy life is, that in the sweat of our faces we should eat bread.  We observe that everything we eat or use or make comes from the earth by labor; but no one knows how abundantly the Mother can supply her children.  It is well said that no man yet knows the capacity of a square yard of earth.

The farmer thinks that he has done well if he gets a hundred and fifty or two hundred bushels of potatoes from an acre; he does not know that others have gotten 1284 bushels.

("Mr. Knight, whose name is well known to every horticulturist in England, Once dug out of his fields no less than 1284 bushels of potatoes, or thirty-four tons and nine hundreds weight (about 34 bushels to the ton), on a single acre; and at a recent competition in Minnesota, 1120 bushels, or thirty tons, could be ascertained as having been grown on one acre.”  P. Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories and Workshops,” page 114.)

Let us realize what an acre means.  An acre is a square about 209 feet each way, 4840 square yards of land.  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.  It is much easier to grow 200,000 lb. of feed on one acre than to grow them on ten acres.

To cultivate is to watch the soil as you would watch your cooking and to tend the crop as you would tend your animals.  The crop is as alive as the stock and as easily gets sick.

If an ordinary farmer rents 60 acres at $5.00 per acre, a moderate rent for good land, he pays out in cash $300, besides farm wages.  If he buys it, his interest and taxes will amount to nearly as much; but if he tills but five acres intelligently, he can get as much out of it as out of an ordinary farm, and even if his rent be as high as $30 per acre for well situated land, he is $150 to the good; besides, doing the work himself, he has no drain of capital for wages.