If you have a farm, Intensive Cultivation should interest you all the more. Every farm is full of opportunities to make good money; but you must not make the usual mistake of half working a big piece of land; that means that you will always be overworked, always have a lot of things that you know ought to be done, but cannot find time to do; always have common grade crops that bring common prices. Everyone that is overworked is underpaid, for he cannot do his best work. Use the big fields for pasture, or for raising fine horses, or for pigs or Angora goats or even for sheep; you had better let the fields run wild rather than half cultivate them. Keep accounts and watch your chance to sell all the land that does not pay well. It may be that you are missing a fortune in the old neglected orchard, or in the chestnut or hickory grove. The black walnuts or butternuts, that are usually left for the neighbors’ boys, may be the most profitable part of the farm. The wood-lot may have possibilities for barrel hoops, which may be sold to the improvement of the timber. It may need only thinning to bring you a steady income while it increases in value. Fine apples grafted on the old trees that now bear only cider apples, if properly sprayed and thinned so as to give first-class fruit, may sell for more than all the corn you can raise.[1] The “pesky briers” that the farmer struggles with year by year, may be the raspberries and blackberries that will sell readily for good prices, when they are cultivated, to the summer residents or boarding-houses. Your exposure and soil may be just the place for the fine strawberries with which, when nicely separated from the second and third grades, no market is ever overstocked. But if you are always behind with the work and always short of cash or worried to pull through, you have no time to think of these things and no means to hire labor nor to develop them. That pond may be needed, if it were cleared out, for a profitable ice supply, furnishing paying work in the winter. The stream may be a valuable water-power or at least may bring a high-priced crop of water-cress; or it may be the very water needed, when properly distributed, to make yours the most fertile land in the county. The bit of swamp land, that raises nothing but mosquitoes, may need only a few dollars’ worth of cranberry sets to be the best paying acre in the country side. There may be a veritable gold mine in a neglected quarry, or brick-clay pit, or kaolin clay deposit, or in a sand bank, or a vein of marl. Possibly you could rent the farm house or let camping sites for the summer to people who would pay city prices for much of your stuff; so that you could afford to keep help enough to leave only the easy work of superintendence for you. Brains save more work than machines.