If I were asked, by a young man intent on farming, to indicate the proper area for him, I would say, _Buy just so large a farm as half your means will pay for_. In other words, "If you are worth $20,000, invest half of it in land, the residue in stock, tools, etc.; and observe the same rule of proportion, whether you be worth $1,000,000 or only $1,000. If you are worth just nothing at all, I would invest in land the half of that, and no more. In other words, I would either wait to earn $500 or over, or push Westward till I found land that costs practically nothing." This, then, I take to be the gist of the popular criticism on our farmers as having unduly enlarged their borders: _They have more land than they have capital to stock and till to the best advantage._ He who has but fifty acre has too much if he lets part of his land lie idle and unproductive for lack of team or hands to till it efficiently; while he who has a thousand acres has none too much if he has the means and talents wherewith to make the best of it all. I have said that I consider the soil of New England as cheap, all things considered, for him who is able to buy and work it, as that of Minnesota or Arkansas--that I urge migration to the West only upon those who cannot pay for farms in the old States. I doubt whether the farmers of any other section have, in the average, done better, throughout the last ten years, than the butter-makers of Vermont, the cheese-dairymen of this State. And yet there is, in the ridgy, rocky, _patchy_ character of most of our Eastern farms, an insuperable barrier to the most economic, effective cultivation. If the ridges were further apart--if each rocky or gravelly knoll were not in close proximity to a strip of bog or morass--it would be different. But the genius of our age points unmistakably to cultivation by steam or some other mechanical application of power; and this requires spacious fields, with few or no obstacles to the equable progress of the plow. I apprehend that, for this reason, the growth of bread-corn eastward of the Hudson can never more be considerably extended, so long as the boundless, fertile prairies can so easily pour their exhaustless supplies upon us. Fruits, Vegetables, Roots and Grass, we must continue to grow, probably in ever-increasing abundance; but we of the East will buy our bread-corn largely if not mainly from the West. He, therefore, who bays land in the Eastern States should regard primarily its capacity to produce those crops in which the East can never be supplanted--Grass, Fruits, Vegetables, Timber. If a farm will also produce good Corn or Wheat, that is a recommendation; but let him place a higher value on those capacities which will be more generally required and drawn upon.