What I know of farming:: a series of brief and plain expositions of practical agriculture as an art based upon science — John Shaqi
What I know of farming:: a series of brief and plain expositions of practical agriculture as an art based upon scienceGreeley, Horace
Science
What I know of farming:: a series of brief and plain expositions of practical agriculture as an art based upon science
Greeley, Horace
Agriculture -- United States
of drinking, hunting, frolicking, rarely working, frontiersmen, who seem
to have been created on purpose to erect log cabins and break paths in
advance of a different class of settlers, who regularly come in to buy
them out and start them along after a few years. I should here prefer to
follow rather than lead. If Co-operation shall ever be successfully
applied to the improvement of wild lands, I trust it may be otherwise.
He who has a farm already, and is content with it, has no reason to ask,
"Whither shall I go?" and he may rest assured that thoroughly good
farming will pay as well in New England as in Kansas or in Minnesota. I
advise no man who has a good farm anywhere, and is able to keep it, to
sell and migrate. I know men who make money by growing food within
twenty miles of this city quite as fast as they could in the West. If
you have money to buy and work it, and know how to make the most of it,
I believe you may find land really as cheap, all things considered, in
Vermont as in Wisconsin or Arkansas.
And yet I believe in migration--believe that there are thousands in the
Eastern and the Middle States who would improve their circumstances and
prospects by migrating to the cheaper lands and broader opportunities of
the West and South. For, in the first place, most men are by migration
rendered more energetic and aspiring; thrown among strangers, they feel
the necessity of exertion as they never felt it before. Needing almost
everything, and obliged to rely wholly on themselves, they work in their
new homes as they never did in their old; and the consequences are soon
visible all around them.
"A stern chase is a long chase," say the sailors; and he who buys a farm
mainly on credit, intending to pay for it out of its proceeds, finds
interest, taxes, sickness, bad seasons, hail, frost, drouth, tornadoes,
floods, &c., &c., deranging his calculations and impeding his progress,
until he is often impelled to give up in despair. There are men who can
surmount every obstacle and defy discouragement--these need no advice;
but there are thousands who, having little means and large families, can
grow into a good farm more easily and far more surely than they can pay
for it; and these may wisely seek homes where population is yet sparse
and land is consequently cheap. Doubtless, some migrate who might better
have forborne; yet the instinct which draws our race toward sunset is
nevertheless a true one. The East will not be depopulated; but the West
will grow more rapidly in the course of the next twenty years than ever
in the past. The Railroads which have brought Kansas and Minnesota
within three days, and California within a week of us, have rendered
this inevitable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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