The Balance Sheets Of Kansas Wheat Farms

Summer County, on the southern line, and Pawnee County, on the western border, show a marked contrast in the manner of raising wheat. The average wheat farm in Summer is about 300 acres. The population of the county 25,797. In Pawnee, the average wheat farm is about 100 acres. The population of the county is 5,630. A Summer County farmer owns all the horses and machinery necessary to the planting of his fields, and he hires but little extra help during the harvest. Wheat land in Summer is worth as high as seventy-five dollars an acre.

The total cost of planting and harvesting for a Summer County wheat farm of 300 acres, taking an actual example of a farm, three miles from a railway station, which was bought in 1884 for $20 an acre, has been planted to wheat every year since, and is now worth $60 an acre, would be, for this year's crop, $1,650.

In Pawnee County, a wheat-raiser may own several thousand acres and not possess a plow, a single harvesting machine, nor any horses. He contracts for all the work, from the time the ground is plowed until the grain is delivered at the elevator. Col. William Scott, who harvested four thousand acres this year, estimated the expense as follows:

Plowing--One dollar per acre $4,000

Drilling--Twenty-five cents per acre 1,000

Seed--Three pecks per acre 1,800

Cost of planting 4,000

Heading and stacking, at $1.28 per acre 5,000

Threshing--Twenty bushels per acre. or 80,000 bushels at 6c. 4,800

Hauling, at 4c a bushel 3,200

Cost of crop at market $19,800

The receipts, on the other hand. may be computed thus:

Eighty thousand bushels at sixty cents $48,000

Use of fields for grazing during the winter 2,500

$50,500

From "This Year's Big Wheat Harvest in Kansas," by Philip Eastman, in the American Monthly Review of Reviews for August.