No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 125 



other team than he sold for. Thus vascillating and ever changing, 

 his progress was always slow, always cramped and discouraging. 

 His row was a hard one. This man and his family were known in 

 the neighborhood where they lived to be hard workers. From morn- 

 ing until night the year around this man and his family were seem- 

 ingly busy at something. His crops were unusually good, as they 

 were well cared for. But the financial part of his management 

 always seemed to be a succession of failures. By way of compari- 

 son, let us make use of a brighter illustration, as a proof that farm- 

 ing as an enterprise need not necessarily prove to be unremunerative 

 and disastrous, as to both pleasure and profit on an eastern farm. 

 A neighbor of this farmer on a farm no larger or better, with family 

 expenses no less, with no better start in life, and yet a farmer who 

 has always seemed to hold time by the forelock, never being driven 

 to a financial move, but successful, as a practical business farmer, 

 whose products usually brought remunerative prices, and whose farm 

 stock seemed to all go off on golden hoofs. The key to this man's suc- 

 cess lay simply in this fact; he adhered strictly to a principle of a 

 mixed husbandry. And his farm productions were all model stand- 

 ards of merit. 



Never being enticed to deviate from, or change his well chosen 

 standards as to kinds, quality or capacity, no matter how strongly 

 the attention of other farmers might be turned towards something 

 else which seemed to be paying the best at the time. He could 

 always be found in possession of one or two good brood mares, a 

 brood sow, a few good stock and butter cows and a few well selected 

 breeding ewes. 



Every year he turned off one or two good horses of his own rais- 

 ing, at prices which made his neighbors nervous to hear about. He 

 usually sold his calves thrifty and shapely in the fall, and was al- 

 ways a matter of encouragement to despairing ones to hear this 

 man tell what he had made from his cows that year; his stock of 

 ewes were always of the best of the larger grade, irrespective of any 

 fine breed, (except in the case of the sire), which he continually 

 weeded from year to year, throwing out the weak, old or defective 

 ones, and drawing his recruits from the best ewe lambs, which 

 he rarely sold. He invariably had a few premium buck lambs, 

 which brought good prices among his neighbor farmers for stock, 

 and raised the average of all the lambs sold, which, added to the 

 amount of money the wool sold for from the ewes, netted him an 

 income from his flock, the exact amount of which never indicated 

 hard times. Having to buy nothing on the top of an inflated mar- 

 ket, but often being enabled to sell some of his various kinds of 

 stock on such a market, and it always seemed that he had some kind 

 of stock or farm products that everybody wanted, and by keep- 



