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I am sure I ought not to be considered as belonging
to the class of gentlemen farmers. They go into the country because they
are rich—I went because I was poor. Yet they have done good service to the
public in various ways. They have imported, naturalized, and propagated
valuable vegetables and fruits. They have patronized costly labor-saving
farm machines and agricultural implements, they have made expensive
agricultural experiments, in the benefits of which all cultivators have
participated. Especially has this been so in relation to fertilizers,
foreign and domestic, natural and artificial. They have improved the breed
of domestic cattle, and imported the best blood from abroad, including
all the fine-woolled sheep. They have shown us how large crops can be
grown, and have otherwise and in various ways radiated good influences
around them, and contributed science, dignity, and encouragement to the
farmer's vocation.
No one can justly deny the value of their services.
Yet it is not by merely cultivating new trees and plants, and exhibiting
large vegetables, gigantic apples or pears, corpulative pumpkins, and
enormous general crops, that agriculture is to be substantially improved
and made profitable to the farmer who depends upon it for a living.
Something more than prodigious crops or beautiful fruit is necessary for
him. He wants to know the cost of them—to see the balance-sheet in which,
while credit is given for the sales of all these fine products, deductions
are made for the expenditures rendered necessary to secure them. A tree
may produce splendid fruit, but the pears may be few, the apples may be
very perishable, and the choice peaches and other trees may bear only
every other year, or only once in three or four perhaps, and then die
before another crop. The accounts must therefore comprehend several years
before the real profits of farming can be truly ascertained.
Herein it is that gentleman-farming is most
commonly in fault. The pecuniary results are never either accurately
known and stated, or are neglected, because of little consequence to the
proprietor. When they happen to be ascertained and divulged, they are
often discovered to be far from remunerative. This disregard of cost has
brought this genteel agriculture, as it may be called, into disrepute.
Common people turn away from it, as inapplicable to the condition of
their' purses. They think they cannot afford it; and doubtless they are
really unable to indulge in this species of agricultural luxury.
It may thus be assumed that this kind of
agriculture, so far from being serviceable to many working farmers, is
really injurious to them. They confound this uncalculating, heedless
practice with book-farming. They believe the conduct of their wealthy
neighbors, who follow farming as an amusement, merely relying on
their city business for their incomes, to be regulated by the instructions
in the agricultural publications of the day. But I fear that this
description of literature does not occupy them much. Moreover, it is
wisely cautious in its recommendations, as those must be who have
witnessed the futility of so many speculations and experiments. High
farming is not bottomed on book-learning, if it fails to make suitable
deductions for the cost of every operation. In truth, gentleman-farming is
too rarely founded on anything but a full purse, and an ambition to
outshine all rivals at a country fair, without much regard to expense. As
far as this is true, such agriculture is neither beneficial in a
pecuniary view, either to themselves or to the working farmer. The latter
finds little in such cultivation that he can copy, because the essential
element of expense is left out of the computation. But book-farming ought
not to fall under censure because genteel farming happens not to be
lucrative. For the man who can afford to buy almost everything he needs,
and sell very little that he raises, farming is undoubtedly a delightful
amusement. For the man who can afford to sell almost everything he
raises, and whose wants are moderate as mine, farming is a lucrative
employment. To the oft paraded statistics of premium reports I cannot
answer with a sneer. The question is simply this— whether farming, upon
the whole, is a profession warranting a certain degree of scientific
culture, and giving room for its display—whether
it is worthy to enlist the energies and ambition of a young man who has a
good life to live, and a career to make? This question may be answered by
looking almost anywhere around us. No doubt a farmer should have some
practical familiarity with those facts, whether of science or experiment,
which have a bearing on his trade. It would be well for him to
understand chemistry in its application to farming, yet he should also
assiduously gather up those unexplained facts for which even chemistry
cannot account.
It would be well for him to know why the johnswort,
the wild carrot, and the Canada thistle thrive so heriocally in spite of
bad treatment, where are their weak points, where the heel of these
Greeks, what degree of heat in the compost pile will destroy the
germinating power of seeds, and whether the law of one seed is the law of
another seed. He should be a man of business and of some means, for he has
his system to decide upon, his labor to engage and direct, his stock and
implements to buy, and then his crops to sell, his bills to pay, and his
books to balance. Superphosphates certified to by one set of
gentlemen-farmers, and the most brilliant eulogies on American farmers,
delivered by another set, will not help him much at these things. Money
may: indeed every farmer ought to have a little of this commodity to start
him fairly.
In almost all locations there are difficulties to
encounter. One of these is that of securing efficient laborers. American
laborers of the right sort are
rarely to be found. American blood is
fast, and fast blood is impatient with a hoe among carrots.
It is well
enough that blood is so fast, and hopes so tall. These tell grandly in
certain directions, but they are not available for working over a heap of
compost. Farm labor, to be effective, must have the personal oversight of
the master. There is breadth and significance in the old saying of Palladius, "If you would push a crop through, look after it yourself."
Another difficulty is the lack of desirable market facilities. The
middleman stands between the producer and the consumer, and monopolizes
much of the profit. In this respect farmers might help each other by
judicious combination, but they lack coherency as a class. They have too
little esprit du corps.
There is too much of isolation, and isolation will inevitably prey upon
the farmer's purse. Then Young America has a growing aversion to manual
labor. He is a gentleman; and shall a gentleman take off his coat? He is
vain of his culture, and is mortified to find that ordinary sagacity and a
rude energy surpass him in success. He learns with pain that knowledge is
not confined to books, and that the shrewdness which can mould raw
laborers into effective helps, tells more upon the year's profits than the
theories of Liebig, or the experiments of Lawes.
But the difficulties thus referred to are many of
them gradually disappearing. The labor question, especially, has been
wonderfully simplified by the introduction of new and effective
implements, which enable the farmer to reduce
the number of his hands. But since they do exist,—and I think my
representations, though they may seem to show the shady side of the
business, will be sustained by the testimony of practical men,—it is best
to meet the whole truth in this matter, whatever ugly faces it may wear.
No man conquers a difficulty until he sees it plainly. Oaks are fine
things, and rivers are flne things; and so are sunsets, and
morning-glories, and new-mown hay, and fresh curds, and milch cows. But,
after all, a farm, and farming, do not absorb all the romance of life, or
all its stateliest heroics. There is width, and beauty, and independence
indeed; but there is also sweat, and anxiety about the weather, the crops,
and the markets, with horny hands, and sometimes a good deal of hay-dust
in the hair. But if a man, as has been said, is thoroughly in earnest; if
he have the sagacity to see all over his farm, to systematize his labor,
to carry out his plans punctually and thoroughly; if he is not above
economics, nor heedless of the teachings of science, nor unobservant of
progress otherwise, nor neglectful of the multitude of agricultural lights
which shine everywhere around him; let him work, and he will have his
reward. But work as he may, it will be impossible to toil harder than
thousands in the cities; who, with all their toil of head and hands, end
life as poverty-stricken as when they began.
Somehow it happens, that almost every man who has
been city-bred feels at times a strong desire to settle down among the
trees and green fields, from a vague and
undefined belief that the country is the scene where human life attains
its highest development. He cherishes a hope, though perhaps a faint one,
that he may yet possess a country home, where he may tranquilly pass his
latter years, far away from city tumults and trials. This hope is founded
on the instinctive desire there is in human nature to possess some portion
of the earth's surface. I know that one looks with indescribable interest
at an acre of ground which is his own. I am sure that there is something
remarkable about my trees. I have a sense of property in every sunset over
my own hills, and there is perpetual pleasure in the sight of the glowing
landscape at my own door. I have found Ten Acres Enough; and I know well
what pleasures, interests, and compensations are to be found in the
little affairs of that limited tract. The windows of the snug library,
into which I retire in winter, look out across the garden on the blank
gable of my barn. When I came here, it was rough and unsightly. But now
that homely gable is a blank no longer. Every inch is clustered over with
climbing roses, honeysuckles, and variegated ivy, in whose tangled mass
of vine and foliage the song-birds build in summer, while to the same
annual granary the snowbirds come in flocks to gather seeds in winter.
Though I could not aspire to being a gentleman-farmer, seeing that I came
to make my fortune, not to spend one, yet I have sought to make farming a
sort of social science, in which not only the head and hands could be
employed, but the sympathies of the heart
enlarged and elevated. In short, to establish a home for the family.
I desire no association with the man or
boy who would wantonly kill the birds that sing so cheerfully around our
dwellings and our farms: he is fitted for treason and murder. Who among us
does not, with the freshness of early morning, call up the memory of the
garden of his infancy and childhood; the robin's nest in the old
cherry-tree, and the nest of young chirping birds in the currant-bush; the
flowers planted by his mother, and nurtured by his sisters? In all our
wanderings, the memory of childhood's birds and flowers is associated with
that of mother, sister, and our early home. As you would have
your children intelligent, virtuous,
and happy, and their memory, in after-life, of early home a pleasant or
repulsive one, so make your farms and your children's home as your
business of life, then adorn that business throughout. If you would
inspire your own children and your neighbors with the nobleness of your
business, then draw about you such an array of beauty as no one but the
cultivator of the soil can collect. Let every
foot of your farm show the touch of refinement. While you are arranging
your fields for convenient and successful cropping, let it be done with
order and neatness. While building the fence,
let it be beautiful as well as substantial. While arranging your
vegetable-gardens and orchards do not overlook geometrical regularity.
Do not, on any account, omit the planting of flowers and the various
kinds of fruit-trees.
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