No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 231 



A dairy should be light and cool and well ventilated ; not a dark, 

 damp little cave as many of them are. It is impossible to make good 

 butter without clean, sweet milk and cream, and clean, sweet sur 

 roundings; and it is this cleanliness and sweetness that makes the 

 charm of the churn and that are the essentials of butter making. 



WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH THE PENNSYLVANIA FARMER 



By T. D. HARMON, National Stockman and Farmer, Pittshurg, Pa. 



It is an old and true saying that ''Our friends tell us our faults ; our 

 enemies encourage them." It is upon this theory that a few thoughts 

 along this line might not be amiss on this occasion. Without the re- 

 motest idea of fault-finding or criticising any one or any condition, 

 "with malice toward none and charity toward all," it shall be The aim 

 of the speaker to point out some of the shortcomings of so)ne of the 

 farmers of our grand old Commonwealth, and if possible offer some 

 suggestions for overcoming the same. 



No man is perfect. The trained mechanic, the learned professor, 

 the teacher, the doctor, the business man — each make mistakes. Then 

 why should we not expect to find errors in judgment among those who 

 till the soil or tend the herds, and while looking for those things 

 which might be made better among the farmers of Pennsylvania, it 

 is only justice to say that in other states worse conditions prevail 

 and criticisms could be applied more fittingly than in our own. 



I honestly believe that the first and greatest fault to be found Avith 

 the farmers of this or any other state could be placed under the head 

 of Laziness. I anticipate a storm of protests from those who hear 

 this, from those who have been putting in from fifteen to eighteen 

 hours out of each twenty-four hours of the day during this busy sea- 

 son we are just now passing through, but I stick to the original propo- 

 sition. It is said that God. as a climax to His creative genius, made 

 Man; that he made him a little lower than the Angels; that He gave 

 him reason and the power to think ; that He then placed him in the 

 Garden of Eden and gave him power and dominion over every other 

 living creature. Later on in the Good Book we are told that He classi- 

 fied the peoples of the earth, making some of them kings and princes, 

 overseers, hewers of wood and bearers of burdens. There is a signifi- 

 cance in all this. If the allwise Creator has done all this — has re- 

 corded in His Divine Word an outline of His idea as to what man 

 should do and man should be, then it is our duty to study His designs 

 and purposes and follow them out as nearly as possible. If God gave 

 you more brains and less muscle than the ox, then He intends that you 

 should use your brains more than the ox and your muscle less than 

 the ox- Herein is where the word "'lazy" applies to too many men — 

 whether they are farmers or follow other vocations. I believe, how- 

 ever, that it will apply more often and more directly to those who till 

 the soil than to any other class of people. 



