470 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



Oct. 



f'or the New England Farmer. 

 BOOK-FARMING. 

 BY ICHABOD HOE. 



"Wal, neighbor Oilman, what new-fangled no- 

 tion you goin' into now, I should like to know ? 

 Beats all, what nonsense some folks do run into, 

 now'days." 



"I'm building a hen-house, and I'm going to 

 try and make a place under it to save the sink- 

 slops and the guano from the hen-roost, too." 



"Sink slops, guano, and fol-de-rol ! All this 

 comes of reading so many ag'cul'tral books and 

 papers, and gettin* yer head full of silly notions, 

 and spendin' yer means in what I call book-farm- 

 in', which is the worst kind of nonsense." 



"It takes everybody to know everything, Mr. 

 Richards, and everybody may be supposed to 

 know something. You have your views, and have 

 a right to them, and to act upon them. But 

 whether you are wiser than others, remains to be 

 seen." 



"Wal, any fool might see that a large farm is 

 more profitable to carry on than a little one, and 

 if instead of spendin' yer time and money in 

 buyin' and readin' so many good-for-nothin' 

 books and papers, and on so many foolish no- 

 tions, you were to save yer money and buy land 

 ■with it, you might do something in the world." 



"Perhaps a.ny fool might think it wiser to half 

 cultivate a great farm than well cultivate a small 

 one ; for my part, I am very well content with 

 my thirty-acre farm, and perhaps a few years may 

 convince even you that all the folly and non- 

 sense in the world is not confined to books or 

 those who read them." 



"At the eend of that few years of yer book- 

 farmin', I shouldn't wonder if you found your- 

 self in the poor-house. My father was one of 

 the best farmers of his day, and made more 

 money than two or three farmers do now'days, 

 and all the books and papers he used to buy in 

 a year was an almanac." 



"His system of farming might do where the 

 land was newer and more productive than it is 

 now. But we have got to take a little difi'erent 

 course, or we shall all get into the poor-house 

 together — there is no doubt about that." 



"Nonsense, nonsense ! the sile is the same 

 now 'twas then, but the climate has changed 

 some, and things winter-kill worse than they 

 used to. But le's see, you must 'ev laid out 

 mor'n a hundred dollars, fust and last, sense you 

 begun this 'ere book-farmin' of yourn. You put 

 a suUer under yer barn fust, then you made some 

 kind of fixin' under yer little-house, and now yer 

 spendin' twenty or thirty dollars on a hen- 

 house." 



"Yes, the cellar under my barn cost me, reck- 

 oning time and all, very near a hundred dollars, 

 and I consider it money well spent." 



This conversation took place between two 

 neighboring New England farmers of widely dif- 

 ferent views. Mr. Richards had a large farm of 

 naturally strong but stony soil, which he farmed 

 in the old-fashioned way. Mr. Oilman was a 

 man of less means but more intelligence. He 

 had begun to have some idea of a more sensible 

 way of cultivating the soil than the skimming 

 method. His farm and that of Mr. Richards lay 

 adjoining. Mr. Richards was a very matter-of- 



fact kind of man — and anything that did not 

 promise to bring an immediate return for its out- 

 lay was considered worthless by him. But im- 

 perceptibly to him, at first, under his system of 

 cultivation, his farm was constantly running 

 down. By degrees the hay crop sensibly de- 

 creased, and this rendered it necessary to reduce 

 the stock, and this, of course, reduced the 

 amount of manure for fertilizing the soil. What 

 made the matter still worse, Mr. Richards con- 

 tinued to cultivate the same number of acres that 

 he did when his lands were more fertile, and 

 when he had more manure, too. Just so much 

 land had to be "broke up," and just so much "laid 

 down," every year, and the breaking up and the 

 laying down did less and less good each year, for 

 at each laying down the land became more com- 

 pact and heavy, and having a greater tendency 

 to hold the water from rains and snows on the 

 surface, which, freezing there, injured or winter- 

 killed the grass. And what really arose from 

 the ignorance and mismanagement of Richards, 

 himself, he attributed to the climate and to 

 Providence. 



This dislike to book-farming extended also to 

 the improvements in the tools and implements of 

 farming ; his plowing, which was in fact only a 

 kind of rooting, was done with the old-fashioned 

 home-made plows, heavy, clumsy, and worse than 

 worthless. The work after such plowing was 

 work of the hardest kind. It was hard planting, 

 and harder yet hoeing, and both consumed triple 

 the time that should have been required, which 

 made the work with Mr. Richards always be- 

 hind-hand, though he worked and hurried early 

 and late. By plowing too much, the plowing 

 was not done till after the planting should have 

 been done, and the planting was not done till af- 

 ter some part of the crops were suS'ering from 

 neglect of hoeing ; and before the hoeing could 

 be done, the haying would be pressing, and so it 

 went from the opening of spring to the closing in 

 of winter. A farm managed in that way makes 

 a slave of the proprietor and all connected with 

 it, and after all, brings no satisfaction, but dis- 

 appointment and vexation. Everything seemed 

 to Mr. Richards to conspire to injure his pros- 

 pects and blight his hopes. At one time every- 

 thing was suliering from too much wet, and then 

 everything was parking up from the drought, 

 and what succeeded in surviving these evils the 

 insects would beset or destroy. 



The course of Mr. Oilman was very different. 

 When he first began to make experiments and 

 "improvements," he very naturally committed 

 some "morus multicaulus" blunders, but he was 

 even then, on the whole, a gainer. He soon dis- 

 covered that farmers generally were commit- 

 ting one great blunder in attempting to cultivate 

 too much land ; that there was a vast difference 

 between just skimming the surface and deep 

 thorough cultivation, in the result. This very 

 soon led him to place a proper estimate upon 

 fertilizers, and to use every means in his power, 

 to obtain them. He saw at once the wicked- 

 ness and folly of throwing the manure of the 

 stalls out-doors to be drenched by the rains 

 and dried by winds till it was nearly worthless, 

 and he set about making a good, warm, substan- 

 tial cellar under his whole barn, into which the 

 manure whs to be thrown, and where by proper 



