118 STATE BOAED OF AGRICULTURE. 



to give advice to farmers; that if thej only had the time and opportunity 

 they could show almost any farmer how to conduct his business more 

 successfully than he is conducting it himself. It is one of Heaven's 

 kindest acts of clemency that not more of these good and kindly disposed 

 people are given the opportunity to relieve themselves of their amusing 

 conceit. 



Of this thing I am certain, that no man who has not lived as farmers 

 live; no man who has not thought as farmers think, felt as farmers feel, 

 met and faced and solved the same difficulties that farmers are contin- 

 ually and persistently being compelled to meet and face and solve, has 

 any conception of what it means to be a successful business farmer. 

 In other words, that no man who has not been through it all himself has 

 any right to map out a course for others to follow. 



If any of you question tliis position or would accuse me of narrowness 

 in this view, permit me to ask what you would think if, in a convention 

 of merchants, called for the purpose of considering mercantile affairs, a 

 farmer, who had never had any experience in mercantile life, were to 

 presume to give advice along mercantile lines; or if, in a convention of 

 doctors or lawyers or manufacturers, a farmer, whose entire life had 

 been foreign to such vocations, were to volubly dilate upon the precise 

 manner in which men engaged in these professions or enterprises might 

 work out a success. 



Do not misunderstand me; I am not belittling the value of intelligent 

 criticism, neither am I questioning for a moment the entire propriety of 

 men of different vocations calling the attention of their friends in other 

 vocations to mistakes they are making, to their lending the helping hand 

 of good advice at any and every opportunity where it will be well 

 received and result in good. There is a great law of the universe that 

 makes every vocation a part of every other vocation. Under that law 

 every successful banker owes occasional kindly business criticism to his 

 true farmer friend. He owes it likewise to his true lawyer friend, 

 his true doctor friend, his true mercantile friend. Each in turn may 

 well help the others from the special fund of experience which he has in 

 store. And I am not mistaken when I say that there are hundreds and 

 thousands of successful farmers who are well qualified to contribute to 

 this common store. But against the idea that the farmers' business is 

 so simple and so easily understood that every man is competent to give 

 him wiiolesale advice I would enter an emphatic and everlasting protest. 



I know of no other line of business in which the field is so broad or so 

 intricate, in which there are so many difficulties to overcome, in which 

 knowledge of so diversified a character and so exact in detail is required, 

 in which close attention and immediate personal supervision are so 

 essential as in that of successful farming. The successful farmer must 

 be an expert judge of the many different kinds of soils. He must know 

 not only the value of those soils but the different crops to which they 

 are adapted, the fertilizers which they need, the proper time to cultivate 

 them and the proper time not to cultivate them. A single stirring of 

 that soil when too wet may destroy the profit of a season's work and 

 deplete the value of the soil for years to come. He must be familiar 

 with the nature of every crop he grows. If successful he must know the 

 laws of growth and the laws of fruitage of every crop«he grows upon his 

 farm. He must know the time to sow, the time to till and the time to 

 reap, and for every crop this is a different problem. I have repeatedly 



