Special Farming. 49 



waste ; it is therefore the best way, is it ? There are old farms in 

 some sections where the privy vaults and drainage from stables 

 are sources of great danger to the health and even lives of the 

 people through the well water. In these sections you may find 

 here and there a " crank " who uses an earth closet, and allows no 

 accumulations of filth about his place. He is all wrong, is he, 

 and the mass right ? Well -drained farms are the exception in 

 some towns where the soil is heavy clay, and therefore tile drain- 

 ing is a bad practice, is it ? I think you must agree with me that 

 common practice does not prove any way to be necessarily the 

 best. If all farmers were thoroughly up to the times and busi- 

 ness-like in their methods it would be different. Then the judg- 

 ment of many would be better always than that of one. It is not 

 my desire to lay out any plan for any one else to follow or to urge, 

 you all to go into some special line of farming. All I wish to do 

 in this chapter is to fairly set forth the claims and advantages of 

 such farming, and meet some of the objections urged against it 

 and set you to thinking, whether because you have always done a 

 certain way, and, perhaps, your neighbors have, too, it is there- 

 fore necessarily the best way to keep on doing. That is all. All 

 improved practices must be agitated before they are generally 

 adopted. 



We have farmers who think they must raise some wheat to 

 make bread for the family, some oats to feed the horses, some 

 corn for the pigs and cattle, some buckwheat for griddle cakes 

 and maple syrup to eat on them; every variety of garden truck, 

 and some hens and ducks and turkeys, perhaps, to scratch it up ; 

 all kinds of fruit, large and small ; a little patch of potatoes, and 

 a few acres of apple orchard, of course, and a small dairy, to say 

 nothing of calves, colts and pigs. This is about what some of 

 you are doing; yes. And why are you doing it? Why, just 

 because you always have, and you have a string of arguments in 

 favor of this way, learned by heart, and a longer string against 

 any sort of special farming, and you rattle over these arguments 

 just as your fathers did before the days of railroads and tele- 

 graphs. Well, no; you have changed some, but not as much as 

 the times have. Your wives do not spin or weave much now, nor 

 do they knit many stockings. Most of you have come into line 

 on division of labor thus far. There are not so many carpet rags 

 cut and sewed where the labor, perhaps, brings the tired house- 

 wife a cent an hour. You do not split out your own shingles, as 

 you used to do. You haven't your bench and tools to make your 

 own shoes, as many farmers had as long ago as I can remember. 

 Some of you now do sell your wheat and buy your flour, instead of 

 taking a grist to mill. You do not have your own clothes made 

 at home by your wife any longer. Farmers used to build their 

 own houses, of logs perhaps, and make and repair their own 

 tools. Now carpenters build the houses not one man, for it 



