828 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



BUSINESS PRINCIPLES SHOULD OBTAIN. 



Not withstanding the existance of hundreds of abandoned farms and 

 the constant exodus from the farm to the city, the farm, in its numerical 

 and financial strength, is today the greatest power in the whole civilized 

 world. The farmer is not recognized as he should be, because he seeks 

 neither notoriety nor prominence, but quitely does his work, allowing 

 others to play at society and to receive its shallow reward. Here, how- 

 ever, has been made a grievous mistake. The farmer, like the lawyer, 

 should be proud of his profession, sufficiently appreciative of it to con- 

 tribute to it the full measure of his self-respect. Because he does not do 

 so he has lost both the social and business prominence which really be- 

 longs to his calling. 



Some farms do not pay, partly because some farms cannot be made 

 to pay.The totally barren farm is a worthless piece of property — the 

 sooner abandoned the better. Probably not more than one-half of our 

 fertile farms pay as well as they would pay were the right effort made. 

 Too many farmers, instead of working their farms, allow their farms to 

 work them. The principles of business, the laws of progressive economy, 

 are not applied to the farm as they are to other callings. Consequently, 

 the farmer is not always financially well to do, and usually through no 

 fault of the farm but because he does not exact what he should from it. 

 The tendency today is unmistakablj' away from the farm. The farmer's 

 boy, partly because he wants a change, but largely because the great un- 

 known shines with a light apparently brighter than all the lights he has 

 ever seen, desires to leave the farm and to earn his living under entirely 

 different conditions. But the farmer's boy is not altogether to blame 

 for leaving the farm. The fault, in more than half the cases is due to the 

 farmer himself and the way the farm is conducted. The boy, brought up 

 upon the farm which is not properly cultivated, and were most of the 

 work is drudgery, or is made to be drudgery, where intellectual growth 

 is stunted, naturally, in the ignorance of his youth, assumes that all farms 

 are like the farm of his childhood and that the opportunities of life must 

 be elsewhere. Therefore he gravitates to the city. 



HARD work; IIUCII OF IT UNNECESSARY. 



Farm work is hard. There is no denying it. The farmer, as much 

 as any other man, earns his living by the work of his hand and by the 

 sweat of his brow. Farmers, as rule, are the hardest of our workers, 

 except the miners. They literally bend to their labors, and many of them 

 bend altogether too much in their assumption that the success of the farm 

 is dependent upon the quantity rather than upon the quality of their work. 



If the average farmer works harder than the business man it is not 

 always because he has to. but generally because he thinks he must. The 

 excess of drudgery is usually the fault of the drudge, not of the work 

 itself. So far as the long farm hours are concerned, they are no longer 

 than those required of the majority of men in business for themselves 



