TENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X 613 



WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD FARMER. 



Bt Feed F. Beebee. 

 (Before Harrison County Farmers' Institute.) 



To be a good farmer means more than we, as a farming people are apt 

 to think. The farmer, who by hard and incessant toil for a long period 

 of years, and aided by wife and children, has accumulated a comfortable 

 living, is generally thought to be a good and successful farmer. Whereas 

 it may be in his haste to attain wealth he has sacrificed many of the es- 

 sentials of a good farmer, or those things to which he and his family are 

 entitled. He has had no time, and allowed his family no time, to cultivate 

 their minds and fill their brains with knowledge that will prove a source 

 of delight in future years, and help to tide them over many an hour that 

 would otherwise be lonely and unprofitable. The farmer in the twentieth 

 century must be progressive along all lines. He must keep abreast of 

 his competitors in maintaining the fertility of his soil, in the choice 

 and use of farm machinery, in the growing of grain for seed, or 

 obtaining the very best with strong germinating qualities. The fact as to 

 whether he farms large areas or small, does not indicate particularly as 

 to his proficiency as a farmer. His acres may be few and yet by his at- 

 tention to details he may be one of the best of farmers. In fact I believe 

 that the owners of small farms, are as a rule, better farmers, and as good 

 citizens as those owning large estates. 



In speaking of farming tools I believe that as many err in buying too 

 many, as in buying too few. We often find on farms, tools of every kind 

 and make and tools not needed. Often they are standing about the fields 

 or in out of the way places, uncovered and uncared for, and are soon gone 

 to the bow wows. A farmer on perhaps a rented farm who has been fairly 

 prosperous and feeding one car of steers followed by 60 to 100 hogs, will 

 go to his dealer and open up the subject of gasoline engines, feed grinders, 

 etc., and before he is aware he has bought both, and perhaps an engine 

 and grinder of capacity suflacient to grind feed for six or eight cars of cat- 

 tle. Neither of these machines were needed and then because it will fit 

 in so well, he buys a feed cooker (which to him is a nuisance). 



He perhaps is milking two or three cows, and his dealer, located maybe 

 in his own town, or it may be a Chicago catalog house have impressed 

 upon his mind the great value of a cream separator, and he gets out the big 

 catalogue and sends in the cash for the "very best separator ever made" to 

 aid his women folks in caring for 5 or 6 crocks of milk per day, whereas it 

 will take longer each day for the women to part and clean the separator 

 than to care for the milk in the old way. Then they see in the big book 

 a picture of a machine to grind bones and oyster shells for the chickens. 

 They have nearly twenty and as they have a good grinder for meal they 

 send for the bone cutter and calculate the returns will make it right when 

 the "hens begin to lay." 



