34 TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY Report. 
ings cost. ‘This statement of itself does not appeal to me as having 
any special significance. A property is likely to sell for what it is 
worth, and this worth depends on its effectiveness as an economic 
unit or enterprise. Most of the buildings on farms were erected 
as much as a generation ago when the ideas of farming were 
radically different from those of the present day. It is doubtful 
whether most of these buildings were ever really effective even for 
the old kind of agriculture. At all events, few of them are adapted 
to the business that we must now conduct on the land. Many a 
farm would be worth more with the buildings off than with them 
on, for they would not then stand in the way of real betterment. 
Buildings are not permanent attachments to land and should not 
be so regarded. A countryman is always impressed, when he goes 
to the great cities, with the fact that buildings still in a good state 
of preservation are torn down to make place for new ones. These 
demolished buildings may not even be very old, but they are in- 
effective for present day business and it is unprofitable to keep 
them. The coming business of farming will demand a wholly new 
type of building in order to make the property effective, and we 
must overcome our habit of harking back to the time when the 
present buildings were erected. Every good farm ought to pay 
for itself all over again, land, buildings and all, every generation. 
Barns and other business buildings that were erected forty or fifty 
years ago should owe the farm nothing by this time. My hearer 
must realize the fact that we are beginning a new agriculture, not 
continuing an old one. 
We must be careful, also, not to be misled merely by the appear- 
ance of farm property. It is often said, for example, that Tomp- 
kins County, from which I come, is a region of abandoned farms 
and declining agriculture, and the great number of deserted farm 
buildings is cited in proof. Now, the abandonment of farm build- 
ings may or may not be a cause of apprehension and regret. Build- 
ings may be abandoned because two or more properties have been 
combined into one and not so many buildings are now needed; or 
because the farmer has moved from an old building into a new 
and better one. In many parts of the State the buildings are no 
doubt too many and the farm properties too small for the greatest 
effectiveness. These properties were laid out or divided at a time 
when there was no great West and when these eastern lands grew 
the grain and other tilled crops for the large markets. Some of 
them were probably laid out in their present form in war time, 
