7O Our Farming. 



only time when I am bothered at all with my long strips about 

 1 6 rods by 60 is when it becomes necessary to. cross-harrow. 

 But we manage so as to not do this very often. 



You talk about competition with the large farmers of the 

 West, who have great fields, being too much for you; that it is 

 driving you to the wall! Well, it is driving old methods to the 

 wall, true enough. You cannot do as you once could, before the 

 West was settled up, and make money any longer, not as a rule. 

 You can manage so that competition will not prevent a grand 

 vSuccess. Lots of men here and there have done this, and you 

 know it. Are you not as smart? Wake up! A little farmer 

 even can make his rows long, too, which is part of the advantage 

 of a big field. 



When the writer had something to say on this point at an 

 institute in Maine last winter, where he thought he saw need for 

 some improvement in this line, for less little-patch farming, one 

 farmer answered : ' ' Oh ! but that means more work and more 

 help, which we cannot afford to hire. We want to know how to 

 make money; not to spend it." Alas, that it is so, but there is a 

 withholding that tendeth to poverty. You may get poorer and 

 poorer trying to work clay land till you tile drain it. Your build- 

 ing may rot down if you do not pay out a little for paint. I never 

 made any money on the do-what-you-can-yourself-and-let-the-rest- 

 go principle. The more help the better, if kept profitably 

 employed. I am aware that sometimes one cannot, for some 

 good reason, get his fields into real good shape. I cannot get 

 mine just as I would like them, but they are very much better 

 than they were. Do the best you can, friends, that is all, and as 

 fast as you can. Look around, and think a good deal. Perhaps 

 you can do better than you now think. There is almost always a 

 way where there is a determined will. Men who owned my farm 

 years ago doubtless thought they had done the best they could. 

 In truth, it did not make so much difference then. They did not 

 do so much tillage then. They sowed wheat by hand among the 

 stumps, and mowed with a scythe. You could cut a small, 

 irregular-shaped lot as well this way as you could a larger one. 

 I believe I should like it better to have the swaths short, so I 

 could stop oftener, and I do not know but I would when drop- 

 ping potatoes. Glad they were not long when I was a boy ! But, 

 oh, how times have changed ! With my six-foot mower I can lay 

 low an acre of grass in thirty or forty minutes, in a long field, 

 and the potato planter has a steel back, which never gets tired. 



We were fortunate in having the highway running nearly 

 east and west, pass about through the middle of our cultivated 

 land. About half lies one side, around and back of the barn, and 

 half the other side, back of house and each side of it. The road 

 answers as a lane for us. The barn is nearly in the centre of 

 land, so crops are quickly drawn in and manure out. This saves 



