NO. 6. 



THE farmers' cabinet. 



S3 



Ihinks the fanner has a hard row to lice, and 

 It is not till near the close of life he gets free 

 from debt. When he dies the same process 

 has to be gone over again, by every genera- 

 lion, who sends four-lifths of the value of 

 our land after thcni. Now this is poor policy, 

 and I sometimes wonder that our farms are 

 in any-tolerable condition ; for their worth 

 many times over has been sent away to the 

 west. If, instead of this, our farmers would 

 divide up their farms, and make every acre 

 yield all it can, our towns would not have 

 the appearance of age and decay, whicli most 

 of them have. " Praise a great farm," says 

 the immortal poet of Rome, " but cultivate a 

 little one." 



I have noticed that men, as they grow old, 

 seem to want more land ; and seldom do you 

 lind a man who feels he has enough. I 

 know they talk of the fertility of the west, 

 and the beautiful land to be found lher& 

 And I know, too, that a young man going 

 out there, if he does not die under it, will, 

 in a few years, become thrifty. And why ! 

 The process is easily described. He goes 

 into the wilderness, purchases iiis land, 

 lives in his log cabin, sleeps on the floor, or 

 more likely upon tlie ground, eats upon a 

 slab, pinned up into the logs, and eats what 

 conies to hand, working early and late, and 

 it would be wonderful indeed if he did not 

 gain property. And so would he here. Let 

 a young man take the poorest farm you can 

 name, and labor on it as hard and live just 

 as he d'oes at the west for fifteen years, and 

 he will bo rich here. It is not so much the 

 land that makes the difference, as it is the 

 manner of living, between the west and the 

 cast I was struck while riding in the stage, 

 in listening to the conversation between two 

 farmers, the one from Illinois, the other from 

 the state of Maine. The western man was 

 describing the fertility of soil, contrasting it 

 with New England. " Why, how much 

 corn can you raise to the acre!" says our 

 man from Maine. "I can raise seventy 

 bushels with all ease." " And how much do 

 you get a bushel V " Nine pence a bushel 

 at my door."* Well, says the Maine farm- 

 er, " I can raise three hundred bushels of 

 potatoes on my land and get twenty cents at 

 my door." "Aye, you have to dig them." 

 "True, and don't you have to pick and shell 

 your corn, and after all get but twelve and 

 a half cents a bushel, and only seventy bush- 

 els on an acre." I repeat it, with the same 

 economy and the same industry, a young 

 farmer here can get rich as easy as at the 

 west. Whether they will practice equal 

 economy is more than [ can say. But let 

 fashion once prevail of having smaller farms 



* 1 wclve and a )ial(ctnl». 



and having them cultivated, and you will be 

 surrounded by your own sons, instead of 

 large land holders and a floating population, 

 who hire themselves out to cultivate it, aud 

 have no land. 



The Genesee Farmer, in an article on the 

 size of farms, says, the productions of a tarm 

 should not be confined to one or two arlicles; 

 the farmer should not be principally a wheat 

 grower, not a drover, nor a siiepherd, but 

 should attend nearly oijually to all these 

 ditlerent branches. When ibe busincs-s is 

 tlius varied, too luucii work does not occur 

 at one time, nor too liitle tor the employment 

 of the hands at another. 'J'his variety of 

 business is also necestary to the improve- 

 ment and enriching of the soil— to the pro- 

 duction and application of manure, and to 

 maintaining the benelits of rotation in crops. 

 But it cannot be advantageously adopted on 

 very small fanns, as there would be a great 

 waste of ground, and a great expense of ma- 

 terial, for partition fences, and a loss of time 

 by attention to a great number of small crops. 



Another disadvantage of small farms is, 

 that labor .saving machinery cannot be so 

 profitably used on them ; for where these aie 

 expensive, and the quantity of work they 

 perform is small, the interest on them is a 

 heavy drawback on the profits of the farm. 



Notwithstanding all these disadvantages 

 there is not one farmer in a hundred who has 

 not more land than he can cultivate in the 

 best possible manner ; or to speak more cor- 

 rectly, there is not one in a hundred who 

 has sufficient additional capital to carry on 

 profitably all the operations of the farm. A 

 fiirmer must be able to expend a large sum 

 in addition to what he does in paying for his 

 land, if he expects to make money by the 

 business. But instead of this, the common 

 practice is, to expend all the additional capi- 

 tal which is realised by farming, in purchas- 

 ing more land. Instead of doing this, it 

 would be much better for the farmer {o sell a. 

 part of what he first had, if this is the only 

 way for obtaining additional capital for car- 

 rying on his operations. 



We will suppose the case of a farmer com- 

 mencing business with five thousand dollars; 

 \i', with one half this sum he buys a farm of 

 fifty acres, and with the other half he im- 

 proves it to a high state of fertility, he will 

 do far better than if he should purchase a 

 hundred acres, and have no further means of 

 improving it or of performing the work upon 

 it in the most advantageous manner. Most 

 land, by a judicious expenditure to tiie 

 amount of its cost iipon it, may have its pro-< 

 ductiveness increased four fold, and its pro~ 

 fits to an almost incalculable amount ; if, 

 therefore, a farmer can raise from fifty acre?, 

 twice the aiHcunt of produce that he docs 



