34 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



machinery be freely used ? Could I find plant food adequate for 

 large operations ? Those problems were all reviewed most care- 

 fully, and after reflection, life's work was begun there again, 

 where it was hoped, through the family descent, it would con- 

 tinue through other generations of Wilson-Sanborns, for I 

 believe that man will never make the best farmer who sees in 

 his best days the end of the family on his land, the growth of the 

 farm then mattering but little to him. He who looks upon the 

 farm as an inheritance of the family, affording really the best 

 investment of one's money, (for I believe that solid, permanent 

 farm improvements are a better inheritance than money in the 

 bank that often destroys the character and chances of young 

 men), alone is the man who will build most deeply and broadly 

 farm improvements. 



I adopted the reverse of all that is traditional in your farming, 

 to wit, — extensive intensive farming, a broad acreage well tilled. 

 Our average of a ton of hay per acre for a small acreage must 

 be carried for all the acres of the farm tillable to the equivalent 

 of three tons or more of hay per acre. It must not be confined 

 to the now occupied field lands. All the pasture lands on the 

 farm capable of it must be put to work. The good God never 

 determined that one piece of land which you choose to name 

 pasture should require five acres to keep a cow for five months, 

 and another acre called field should keep a cow the entire year. 

 My farming, extensive intensive agriculture, was to mean that 

 every acre should be put to its utmost use. Carlisle once said, 

 "Up, young man, the utmost that is in thee." The utmost that 

 is in thee and the utmost that is in each acre of the farm must 

 be brought out. I am not asking you to swing loose from 

 democracy and to hold vast areas, but to make every acre you 

 possess do its utmost. 



I am here, then, to advise you to put at work every acre of 

 ground you possess, in its fullest and broadest sense, and make 

 the most of those acres. We will say that on your ioo-acre farm 

 there are thirty or forty acres in tillage, from which you are 

 now getting an average of ten or twelve dollars per acre, making 

 an income of four or five hundred dollars. When you have 

 handled it through one rotation I want it to do in the second 

 round several fold what it is now doing. Let us estimate the 

 possibilities of extensive intensive farming. I will assume a 



