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
Farmers, like other men, divide naturally into two classes--those who do
too much work, and those who do too little. I know men who are no
farmers at all, only by virtue of the fact that each of them inherited,
or somehow acquired, a farm, and have since lived upon and out of it, in
good part upon that which it could not help producing--they not doing so
much as one hundred fair days' work each per annum. One of this class
never takes a periodical devoted to farming; evinces no interest in
county fairs or township clubs, save as they may afford him an excuse
for greater idleness; and insists that there is no profit in farming. As
land steadily depreciates in quality under his management, he is apt to
sell out whenever the increase of population or progress of improvement
has given additional value to his farm, and move off in quest of that
undiscovered country where idleness is compatible with thrift, profits
are realized from light crops, and men grow rich by doing nothing.
The opposite class of wanderers from the golden mean is hardly so
numerous as the idlers, yet it is quite a large one. Its leading
embodiment, to my mind, is one whom I knew from childhood, who, born
poor and nowise favored by fortune, was rated as a tireless worker from
early boyhood, and who achieved an independence before he was forty
years old in a rural New-England township, simply by rugged, persistent
labor--in youth on the farms of other men; in manhood, on one of his
own. This man was older at forty than his father, then seventy, and died
at fifty, worn out with excessive and unintermitted labor, leaving a
widow who greatly preferred him to all his ample wealth, and an only son
who, so soon as he can get hold of it, will squander the property much
faster, and even more unwisely, than his father acquired it.
To the class of which this man was a fair representative, Farmers' Clubs
must prove of signal value. Though there should be nothing else than a
Farmers' Club in his neighborhood, it can hardly fail in time to make
such a one realize that life need not and should not be all drudgery;
that there are other things worth living for beside accumulating wealth.
Let his wife and his neighbor succeed in drawing such a one into two or
three successive meetings, and he can hardly fail to perceive that
thrift is a product of brain as well as of muscle; that he may grow rich
by learning and knowing as well as by delving, and that, even though he
should not, there are many things desirable and laudable beside the
accumulation of wealth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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