Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 315 



Disease has swept out hundreds of herds — and many bank 

 accounts — because conservation was neglected in the swine world. 

 In many little ways conservation leads to wealth. Take, for in- 

 stance, the crops from orchard and garden. We can, by merely 

 canning and evaporating what our gardens grow produce enough 

 food in summer to serve our tables throughout the year. 



All the meat surplus from the farm might as well be cooked and 

 canned or cured, all with very little expense and with work that is 

 forgotten in the pleasure of doing it. Yet so many families sacrifice 

 their farm products at low prices, and supply their tables with 

 inferior food bought at high-priced rates. Then they insist thai 

 farming does not pay, that all the talked of profits are spent for 

 food and machinery. All this time their machinery is rusting in 

 the fields. Missouri lumber is too cheap, and stone and concrete 

 too plentiful to neglect housing the products and machinery of the 

 farm. 



Conserve in the household. I am tired of seeing the good wife 

 carry heavy buckets of water, when it has been demonstrated that 

 any house can for $15 have a little water system of its own. We 

 had better sell the scrub cow and install a tank and faucet with a 

 drain pipe. The wife's health is worth more to the farmer than all 

 else on the farm. With modern machinery, labor for man and 

 woman is greatly reduced. Thus the natural life is prolonged. 

 People should live longer. The average life today is ony 34 years, 

 and men are at their best at from fifty to sixty-five years. We 

 need more older people. We need their brains, their mature judg- 

 ment born of long experience. 



So I say, conserve human life, energy and love. It is for the 

 American of today to conserve the home. It is not alone the low 

 wage that impoverishes the bulk of the working class ; it is the lack 

 of knowledge of spending judiciously what they make a lack of 

 conservation. 



Farmers, take up the cry of conservation. Know, live and 

 practice it. Then pass it on from man to man. 



