124 AGRICULTURE OF MAIXE. 



lish a reputation as a farmer ; but he is a very poor farmer and 

 I will tell you the reason why. He has had all of the good 

 things that come from the farm but he has never paid any of the 

 bills. He has seen all these enthusiastic business men whose 

 sons are going to be farmers and make so much money, but as 

 a matter of fact there is no great amount of money to be made 

 on a farm such as we have in the State of Maine. It is a good, 

 safe, logical reasonable business proposition for a man of small 

 means. Mr. Burt of New York, who is probably one of the 

 brightest government experts we have in the country, wrote up 

 a successful New York farm, perhaps the most successful farm 

 in the State of New York. He went into every detail of that 

 man's whole career, — how he started with a farm that was 

 inherited from his father, how he under-drained and tilled and 

 brought that farm up to its highest state of cultivation, how at 

 the present time he is employed as an expert in the State of 

 New York advising other farmers, mostly rich men who are 

 going to farming, and you would be amazed at the small amouit 

 of the net earnings of that farmer. Now to decry farming is 

 not the object of my talk tonight, because farming is the back- 

 bone of all the industries of the whole world, civilized and 

 otherwise, but the incomes are distributed among thousands 

 and thousands and the net incomes of those individuals are com- 

 paratively small. Still, their investments are small. If we had 

 in the State of Maine ideal conditions, as they have in the West, 

 it would be possible to make those incomes larger, but we 

 cannot farm in New England and with New England I would 

 include the State of New York and perhaps Pennsylvania and 

 Ohio even, in the same way that they do in the West, because 

 our methods of farming must be different from those of the 

 great western prairie reserves where things are done on a large 

 scale. The minute that the farmer takes on more than a cer- 

 tain number of acres, perhaps two or three hundrefl at the 

 outside, the transportation of his products, his fertilizers from 

 his barns to his lands and his crops back into his barns and 

 from his barns to his markets, so rerluces the value of those 

 fertilizers and crops that it becomes almost nothing. Certain 

 efforts have been made in the past to make the Maine farmer 

 think that he is an obect of charity and that is a great mistake. 

 What wc want to do for the Maine farmer is to reduce his 



