358 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[October, 
fails. I have three neighbors. One came from 
the eastern part of the State, ■when the country 
was new. He took up 160 acres of land, cleared 
it, fenced it, lived, probably, at first in a log 
house, worked hard, but enjoyed himself. He 
is a capital farmer, up early in the morning, at- 
tends to his stock, always has his crops sown in 
good seasou, treats his land liberally, and gets 
ample returns. He commenced with little, has 
brought up a large family, given them a first- 
class education, and he is probably to-day worth 
$25,000 to $30,000. True, it has taken him 40 
years to accumulate this amount of property', 
and nearly all of it has been derived from the 
advance of real estate. Still he has had a good 
living, has enjoyed life, is an intelligent, public- 
spirited, energetic, and generous-minded gen- 
tleman, and enjoys the respect of all his neigh- 
bors. I am sure such farming pays. I have 
another neighbor who has a farm of equally 
good laud. He is a well educated man, and 
seems to work hard, but he is always behind 
with his work. He occasionally gets a good 
crop, but the general yield is hardly sufficient to 
pay even for the little labor bestowed in prepar- 
ing the land. He is in debt, and seems to de- 
pend more on chopping and selling wood to 
meet his payments than on raising crops. His 
fences are out of repair, and the land is full of 
weeds. Still he gets a living for himself and a 
large family, and, I suppose, even in his case,we 
must conclude that " farming pays." I have an- 
other neighbor, whose land is low, hut would 
be very productive if attention was paid to sur- 
face drainage. The same creek runs through it 
that runs through the south end of my farm. It 
is choked up with old logs, branches, and fallen 
trees. The water sets back in the spring, and 
floods his land. But he makes no effort to clean 
out the creek. I offered to do it for him, if he 
would give me the wood,but no,he intended to do 
it himself. I presume he has been intending to 
do it for years. A good portion of his land does 
not produce enough to pay the taxes, and the 
dryer portions are not half worked, and yield 
the most meagre returns. I passed his house 
this morning. He was cutting some coarse 
hay on the low land. His oats were harvested, 
but nearly half of them were still lying on the 
ground among the clods, and his wife was 
thrashing the other half in the barn with a flail. 
Now this is rather poor farming, but as the fam- 
ily gets a living, I suppose it " pays." 
But 7ww much does it pay? Does he make as 
much as he would if his son and himself worked 
as hard for some other farmer as they do for 
themselves, to say nothing of the wife ? I do 
not believe they make half as much, and cer- 
tainly their land is not improving, though they 
probably persuade themselves that, owing to the 
improvements of others, it is increasing in value. 
Now, I have no doubt that an intelligent, en- 
terprising man, with the necessary capital, could 
take this farm, and increase its productiveness 
fourfold. But such a man cannot live in the 
style ofits present occupant, and his wife would 
not want to thrash in the barn. And so the real 
question is whether farming will afford sufficient 
profits to enable an educated man to live in a 
style suited to his necessities. I think it will, 
but there are those who contend that it will not. 
Can an educated man get a suitable living by 
making boots ? Can he make much more than 
the illiterate man who sits on the adjoininc 
bench ? Can an educated farmer dig more po- 
tatoes in a day than a good stalwart Irishman ? 
Can he chop more wood than a French Cana- 
dian, or plow better than a Scotchman ? Can 
General Grant fight in the ranks any better than 
Patrick O'Flaunagan? 
The educated shoemaker, as soon as he had 
learned the trade, would have others helping 
him, and by and by, if made of the right kind 
of stuff, he would be the proprietor of a large 
boot and shoe factory, and call to his aid all the 
contrivances for saving labor that modern 
science and invention can afford. 
" This is all very well. I see the point, But 
you cannot make money by farming, unless you 
work yourself." Very true. I never supposed 
you could. Neither can the educated shoemaker. 
He probably 7 works harder than any man in the 
establishment, although he does not wax his 
own strings, or hammer out his sole on the 
lapis. He knows how to do all these things. 
And so must a fanner be acquainted with all 
the details of his business, and must give them 
his undivided attention. But must he neces- 
sarily do his own plowing, dig his own ditches, 
and husk his own corn ? Work he must, and so 
must a manufacturer and a professional man. 
But what work shall he do ? If he has men 
husking corn by the bushel, he should see that 
they husk clean, and tie up the stalks well, and 
make the bundles into stooks that will shed rain, 
and not blow down in the first wind. He must 
see that he is not cheated in measuring the corn, 
and that it is properly sorted. He can make 
more by attending to such things than by husk- 
ing himself. And so it is in nearly all the opera- 
tions of the farm. Especially must he see to his 
stock. Ho will find ten men that can dig po- 
tatoes, husk corn, hoe, plow, cultivate, and even 
build a stack, and dig underdraius, to one that 
can be entrusted to feed pigs or take care of the 
cows. To neglect to feed regularly' and proper- 
ly—to starve this week, and surfeit the next, 
will cost you half the feed. 
But I am wearying you. I am satisfied, how- 
ever, that this subject must receive the attention 
of farmers. Those who intend to make agricul- 
ture their business should study it thoroughly, 
and make themselves masters of every detail. 
They must know how to do all kinds of farm 
work, and should study especially how to direct 
others. It is frequently easier to do the work 
one's self than to show another how to do it, but 
it is better, in the end, to bear with a bungler, 
than to let him stand idle while you do the 
work. John Johnston is employing contrabands 
on his farm, and likes them well, though he 
saj T s, "they cannot set themselves to work." 
That is precisely my idea. A man with a large 
farm must know how to set others to work, and 
see that they do it properly, and he will find 
that this will give him enough to do without 
going into the field to plow himself. Nearly all 
the labor we can now command is unskilled, 
and this state of things will continue. There 
are now thousands of Chinese at work on the 
Pacific Rail-road, and wlieu we think that one- 
third the population of the globe is in the Chi- 
nese Empire, it will not be surprising if the high 
wages paid in this country, should induce hun- 
dreds of thousands to emigrate to San Fran- 
cisco, and from there over the Pacific Rail-road 
to the mines of Colorado and the prairies of the 
Great West. They will not be able to "set 
themselves to work," and the young farmers of 
the country should educate themselves for the 
task. There is not one farmer's son in a hun- 
dred that could do it at present. They have not 
been trained to direct others, and it is time this 
part of a farmer's education received attention. 
If the drouth continues much longer, it will 
be difficult to get in the usual quantity of win- 
ter wheat, It is almost impossible to plow heavy 
land. I have heard of several farmers who have 
abandoned the attempt. We are plowing up an. 
old meadow, which, although somewhat mucky, 
is so hard on the dryer portions that a new cast 
iron point will not last longer than a day. The 
men say the point gets so hot from the friction 
that it will almost burn your hand. The high 
price of cast iron points will compel us to use 
steel points. These can be sharpened by a black- 
smith at little expense, and although the first 
cost is about three times as much as an iron 
point, they are cheaper in the end, and work 
easier. By taking a cold chisel, and putting it 
in a vise or having some one to hold it on the 
top of a large stone, you can, by putting the 
point on the chisel, cut or break off the worn 
end of the point, and it will then do almost as 
good work as when new. Cutting it off square 
with a cold chisel is far better than trying to 
break it off with a hammer or a stone, as some do. 
I think I told you that I proposed to seed 
down this old meadow in September, as soon 
as it was plowed and harrowed. It makes rather 
a rough job of it, but then it is a rough piece of 
land, and at any rate it will be far better than it 
was before. 
I have been consulting Flint's valuable work 
on "Grasses and Forage Plants" in regard to 
the quantity of seed that should be sown per 
acre, but he merely advises liberal seeding, with- 
out saying how much. This is a too common 
fault among agricultural writers, and I should 
have been apt to conclude that the author was 
not as "practical" as I had supposed, but for 
the following sentence. Speaking of the im- 
provement of waste land, he says: "The diffi- 
culty with most small farmers is to begin. Well 
begun is half well done ; for the moment any real 
improvement is begun in earnest, the interest is 
excited, the mental activity is increased, the de- 
sire for improvement partakes of the nature of a 
passion; and hence, though the beginning may 
be small, the end may be the renovation of the 
owner as well as the land." This is well said, 
and eminently true, aud the man that wrote it, 
must have himself tasted something of the pleas- 
ure of renovating waste laud. 
The chemistry of the book is a little out of 
date. For instance, he says: " Every keeper of 
stock knows that to feed an animal oilcake, 
whicJi is out slightly nitrogenous, might fatten 
him, but it would not give him strength of mus- 
cle, or size ; while, if the same animal be kept 
en the cereal grains, as wheat or Indian corn, 
alone, his size rapidly increases, his muscular 
system develops, and he gains flesh without in- 
creasing his fat in proportion." Now, the fact 
is, of ail the foods used for stock, oilcake is the 
most nitrogenous. It contains more than twice 
as much nitrogen as Indian corn or wheat. 
In the same connection it is stated that Tim- 
othy contains more nitrogenous matter than red 
clover. This* may be so in the fresh state, be- 
cause the clover is more succulent than Timothy, 
aud contains more water. But clover hay con- 
tains a good deal more nitrogen thau Timothy 
hay — in fact, nearly double. It is for this rea- 
son that clover hay makes so much richer ma- 
nure than Timothy' hay. But it does not follow 
that it is more nutritious. The old notion that 
a food is nutritious in proportion to the nitrogen 
which it contains, proves unfounded. Peas and 
beans contain twice as much nitrogen as Indian 
corn and wheat, but they are not twice as nu- 
tritious. But they make manure twice as valu- 
able, and this is one of the chief reasons why 
they deserve to be more extensively cultivated. 
