I trust that my experience as a farmer has enabled me to separate, with 

 tolerable completeness, the chafF from the wheat, or at least to select from 

 the teachings of others (whether in the field or in the study,) the infor- 

 mation that the farmer, as a farmer, will be most benefited by gaining. I have 

 endeavored to forego all theorizing, and to state the leading facts of the art 

 and of the science of farming as plainly and clearly as I could, so that any 

 man who can read a-t all, and who has ordinary intelligence, may find my 

 statements as free as possible from "hard words," and that he may feel, as 

 he goes along, that it is a brother farmer who is talking to him, and that 

 what he is saying both his reason and his experience lead him to believe 

 worth the telling. 



If any reader of this page is inclined to raise the cry of " book-farm- 

 ing," I beg to tell him that such a reception might have irritated me a 

 dozen years ago, when I had less irreverence than I now have for a man 

 who thinks that he has inherited, or pulled out of his hoe-handle all of the 

 agricultural wisdom of the age; and to suggest that if he lives twenty years 

 longer, he will live to be ashamed of himself. 



It is now too late in the day for any sensible man to abandon himself 

 to such ridiculous folly as to look with any thing but profound respect on 

 the invaluable aid rendered to agriculture by the discoveries of science and 

 by the practical application of these discoveries; and if any farmer feels the 

 old carping spirit rising within him, he will, if he be wise, look for a mo- 

 ment at the other side of the question and consider in what important 

 particulars his own life has been improved by that which he denounces as 

 book-farming,-to which he owes the iron plow, the mowin? machme, 

 and probably the house over his head. 



My book is intended especially for the use of those practical, working 

 fanners who are willing to believe that, while they have learned much from 

 their own experience, it is not impossible that other farmers (and men in 

 other vocations as well) may have learned something too-somethmg that 

 it may benefit them to learn also; and who are liberal enough to see that 

 all the truth and value of a fact is not destroyed by its being printed. 



As will be seen by reference to the Table of Contents a wide range oi 

 subjects is discussed : in fact I have endeavored to write just such a book as 

 a young man leaving another occupation and turning his thoughts to farming 

 would be glad to take for his guide, and to such I say that there is not 



