FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 119 



seen farmers lose enough to pay their entire tax levy for the year by 

 delaying the beginning of wheat harvest for a single day after the crop 

 was ready for the binder. I have seen more often still a greater amount 

 lost by not having the work so planned that cultivation could begin at 

 the proper time. The variation of a single day in the time one begins to 

 cultivate the corn crop, or any of the crops demanding clean cultivation, 

 not infrequently means that it will afterwards take three days to per- 

 form what one day would have accomplished if done at the proper time. 

 With the hundred different irons in the fire which every successful 

 farmer continually has, I want to say that he who so plans his work that 

 all are taken care of at the proper time, is a general of no mean order. 

 And yet such a man must the successful farmer be. 



But he must be vastly more than this. He must be a trained judge of 

 every kind of stock upon his farm. He must know the laws of their 

 development. He must know the value of the diverse feeds and the 

 proper time to use and not to use. He must know the breeds and the 

 individuals of those breeds, the foods and the conditions whereby he 

 can produce a pound of beef, mutton, pork, milk, butter, wool, at the 

 greatest profit, and it is a different problem in every case, a different 

 problem with every kind of stock, a different problem with every breed, 

 a different problem with every variation in the price of feeds, a different 

 problem with every variation in the market price of the product created, 

 a problem differing with every one of the almost innumerable changing 

 conditions with which the breeder and the feeder are continually sur- 

 rounded. 



The successful farmer must be a good salesman. He must be a stu- 

 dent of markets. He cannot raise all the stock he wishes to feed, hence 

 he must be a good purchaser. He must be a good judge of human nature 

 or he cannot do these things. He must look farther into the future than 

 any other business man for the returns from his investments are gener- 

 ally long delayed. He must be a successful manager of hired labor, one 

 of the most difficult problems with which a farmer has to contend. 

 When you remember that the average farm laborer is an irresponsible 

 sort of person, that he is with one man one year and with another man 

 the next, in one community one year and in another community the 

 next, that his whole training has been such as to make him careless 

 of his employer's interests, at times at least, and yet that you must 

 trust him in the most responsible of positions, that by a single act of 

 carelessness or error in judgment in watering or feeding he can spoil 

 your best team, that he can turn the profit of a winter's feeding into a 

 loss by one or two mistakes with your flock of fattening lambs, that 

 by leaving you suddenly at a busy season of the year he can occasion 

 you more loss than his whole year's wages would amount to, when you 

 remember all these things you will understand the discouraging sigh 

 which emanates from so many good farmers when the hired help ques- 

 tion is introduced. Many and many other qualifications might be 

 enumerated did time suffice, failure, or even weakness, in any one of 

 which would be fatal to the success of a farmer as a business man. 



And yet hundreds of farmers in every agricultural county in this State 

 are successfully^ meeting and overcoming all these difficulties. Shall we 

 deny them the right to be called business men? Can you point out to 

 me any line of business more intricate, anj^ line of business which will 



