Value of better facilities. The cost of wagon transportation would be lowered if the size of load were increased, or the time of round trip shortened, or if both these changes were effected; and either of them could be brought about in many communities by improving certain roads. The cost of hauling should be considered in connection with expenditures for building and improving roads. The size of loads might be increased, without a proportional increase in cost of hauling per 100 pounds, by using larger wagons with more horses or by driving heavier and stronger horses or mules; and the cost of hauling might be further reduced by quickened methods of loading and unloading.

Improvements which would reduce the cost of hauling by one-tenth would effect a saving of $7,000,000 in hauling from farms to shipping points in the United States the products and quantities mentioned, and $1,000,000 more would be saved in the cost of hauling wheat for the use of local mills, to say nothing of the amounts saved in hauling the unknown surplus of the crops not mentioned in this table, such as hay, potatoes, rye, buckwheat, fruit, vegetables, sugar cane, and sugar beets. If it costs a farmer 5 cents per bushel to haul his wheat to the shipping point when he requires one day to make a round trip, he might save $25 on a crop of 1,000 bushels if he could make two trips per day; or, if he still made but one trip a day but could increase the load from 50 to 75 bushels without adding to the number of horses, he might reduce the cost of hauling by one-third, thus saving about $17.

The average load of cotton, if increased to twice its present size and thus made about the same as the average load of wheat, might be hauled at little more than one-half its present cost per 100 pounds. Lowering the average cost of hauling cotton from 16 cents per 100 pounds, as it now seems to be, to 8 cents, would effect a saving of about 40 cents per bale, and the total amount saved on a crop equal to that of 1905 would probably exceed $4,000,000.