320 
American Agriculturist, November 8, 1924 
An Old-fashioned Plow-handle Talk 
The Little Things A re the Big Things in the Everyday Life of the Farmer 
T HE editor asks why not write some old- 
fashioned plow-handle notes referring di¬ 
rectly to the daily movements and incidents on 
the farm. I find in these days of cheap, I mean 
low cost, printed matter 
bringing to ones door every 
day the outstanding events 
of the whole w"orld there is 
a tendency to side step the 
small events of a farm. I 
have just returned from a 
couple of days business trip 
to the big city with the 
good fortune to see the big 
air ship come sailing into, or 
rather over the city. After 
that I spent an hour with 
the milk company, who 
sells our certified milk in 
the city. Which do you 
suppose I talked about the most after arriving 
home? Why the ZR-3 of course. 
While we have had what seems 1 i ke an unusual sea¬ 
son, we seem to gave gotten through about on time. 
Haying time was catchy, but we were only a 
week late and as we open our hay mows the 
quality is fully up to the average. 
Our grain was out during the protracted rains 
but the drawing and threshing came out so that 
not a kernel was damaged nor has it warmed in 
the bins, and is heavy. My, how the liberal use of 
acid rock does make for real grain kernels! No 
light, chaffy stuff; even the late sowed barley and 
oats are heavy, not quite equal to the early sowed. 
By H. E. COOK 
It is an open question now with some farmers 
whether grain growing on dairy farms is profit¬ 
able—however I like to see the big bins for horse 
feed all of the time, and for cows when I want it, 
even though expensive. 
I don’t know how to combine a mixture for 
horses like these soundly filled barley and oat 
kernels, and if horses teeth are kept floated, we 
find but small gain by grinding and horses grind 
these fat kernels much better than those with 
tough outsides and lean insides. Horses like 
folks, chew best what they like best—in the long 
run, good things pay best—of course sound hard 
spun wools cost more when we buy our clothing. 
Thoroughly tanned whole stock leat her costs a good 
deal more when made into shoes than split leather, 
and so on through the list, but it’s worth more. 
There arc always certain fixed overhead 
charges that remain the same whatever the 
quality may be. Probably manufacturing profits 
are not always higher with good stuff but they are 
as a rule the safe bet as a buy. 
There is a shortage of high-testing, good-milking 
dairy cows in New York state, and prices are 
high, and with milk as with other goods mentioned 
above, consumers are looking to total solids as 
well as bacteria count, and because of the cow 
scarcity and high prices, less and less discrimination 
is made in breeding and rearing the young things. 
We are sending a lot of money to Wisconsin for 
seconds and thirds, because we do not have them 
near by, and I speak from experience. 
Clover seeds, from reports, will be very high for 
the coming year. G. L. F. reports say prices will 
be almost prohibitive. What are we to do about 
it? I shall sow less, keep our meadows at work as 
they are, with more top dressing and keep the 
plowed land as plowed land. Our present 
meadow treatment is showing gains in production 
as the years pass and with alfalfa sown freely, the 
hay cut is a pretty good milk-making product. 
Top dressing with stable manure and the use of 
phosphoric acid, shows on alfalfa even though the 
roots are working deep. 
A friend asked me recently what was presently our 
hard problem. I made the following classifications: 
In our business, soils, crops, cows, sanitation, mar¬ 
keting, which includes transportation and labor 
Quickly I answered marketing and labor—and cows a 
good third, 1 refer to high-testing ones. But, he said, 
you have boasted of your ability to get good workers 
and plenty of them. Yes, I said, but you have never 
heard me brag about any patented or psychological 
power for paying them by any means. As a rule, men 
come to us, but organize them in working units which 
they like and will lower the cost of production and 
keep the marketing end alive and active with a 
constant flow of cash to pay them, that’s a problem and 
a real one, and keeps all guessing, and no one has ever 
heard me boasting. 
There wouldn’t be any time to boast after the 
thing has been done, however much I wanted to do so. 
These are real problems and I expect they are no bigger 
at our house than with others who are manufacturing 
and marketing. 
After all has been said, I don’t believe there is a 
happier, more contented and financially safer group 
(Continued on page 334) 
Yates Farms and Farmers 
A Fireside Refection on the Finger Lake People and Their Customs 
I AM an ardent supporter of the 18th Amendment and 
have every confidence that the world is and increas¬ 
ingly will be a better place to live because of it. It 
must be confessed, however, that the grape industry 
instead of being ruined, as expected, has really experi¬ 
enced a boom as the result of prohibition. Apparently 
there are a good many people 
who are experimenting with 
home-made wine in an effort 
to out-wit Mr. Volstead. They 
tell me that last year’s sales 
for this purpose were not as 
large as for two or three years 
previous which may indicate 
that these private vintages 
have proved less satisfactory 
than was hoped. 
So far as varieties of grapes 
are concerned, it seems that in 
Yates County only one sort is 
being planted—the Concord. 
It was first introduced about 
three-quarters of a century ago, 
and while literally hundreds of 
other varieties have been tried 
out, Ephraim Bull’s chance 
seedling still remains far and away the leading grape 
of eastern North America. Not even the Baldwin 
apple has such an unchallenged supremacy. 
But Yates County grow r s a big variety of crops be¬ 
sides grapes. Almost every farm produces wheat. 
Of course many grumble about the price and declare 
that it runs them into debt but they continue to put in 
about the usual area because they understand it and 
because no other crop, unless it might be rye, fits into 
their established rotation. It only proves how slowly 
old agricultural communities change their crop habits. 
Then Yates produces a good many beans. I was told 
of one crop at least which averaged twenty-eight bushels 
per acre. In addition to the value of the beans, the 
straw' is the equivalent of a very good quality of 
legume hay. 
* * * 
In parts of the county a good many canning peas are 
grown. Absolutely no special equipment is required. 
They are sowm with an ordinary grain drill at the rate 
of four bushels or a little more per acre and are cut with 
an ordinary mowing machine. A survey of the opera¬ 
tions of some 265 growers indicate gross returns of a 
little more than $80 per acre. As a legume crop they 
ought to be a soil renovator and they are considered an 
especially good crop to precede wheat. Some varieties 
occupy the ground as little as fifty-five days. This 
By JARED VAN WAGENEN, JR. 
ought to be a splendid cash crop in a dairy community 
because the green vines after the peas are threshed 
will either make a most palatable succulence or can be 
put into a silo and make a valuable although rather 
stinking ensilage. 
The county has some first-class orchards, while down 
in the southeast is a very local but highly developed 
black raspberry industry. These berries are not picked in 
baskets for the city markets but are allowed to get dead 
ripe and are then batted off the bushes with paddles and 
caught in canvas trays and sold to the evaporators. 
I had the opportunity to make a very brief visit of 
only a few moments to the widely known Harpending 
Berkshire establishment at Dundee. The outstanding 
point is that while it is one of the largest Berkshire farms 
in this county, yet there are no expensive permanent 
hog barns. The pens are cheap, movable structures and 
are widely scattered over the fields and through the 
woods and the breeding stock must take its daily exer¬ 
cise regardless of weather conditions. Another thing 
is the very great use of alfalfa hay as hog forage. It is 
fed outdoors in special feeding racks and it seems to 
play almost as large a part as in the feeding of lambs. 
I have no doubt that the whole system makes for vigor 
and hardiness as well as for wonderfully economical 
production. 
I wish my flying visit might have been considerably 
prolonged. Mr. Harry Harpending is very emphatic 
on one point. Feeding hogs on garbage may go well 
for a long time and while it does go w r ell there is money 
in it, but sooner or later the owner will encounter most 
serious disaster in the form of an outbreak of cholera. 
Experiments have positively shown that a hog in the 
early stages of cholera may be slaughtered and the 
meat pass inspection, but the germ is present and is so 
resistant that it survives both pickling and smoking, 
and a ham rind in the garbage will light the fires of 
disease. 
* * * 
After all, in any community the really interesting 
things are not just the crops and farms. Pope w 7 as 
right: “The proper study of mankind is Man.” So I 
visited what is really a sort of shrine. Down close by 
the shore of Seneca Lake is the pretty little village of 
Dresden with four or five hundred people, and here, by a 
strange irony of fate, was born in a parsonage the son 
of a Presbyterian minister, a boy who was destined to 
be known as the arch infidel and most famous agnostic 
of his time, Robert G. Ingersoll. 
The simple white parsonage has been converted into 
the village Community House. On the outer wall is a 
bronze tablet stating merely that he was born in this 
house August 11, 1883. Within is a small but excellent 
library including of course a complete set of his writings. 
On the w alls are many portraits in various poses includ¬ 
ing one in the blue uniform of the Northern army of 
Civil War days, m which struggle he was a gallant 
soldier. It is said of him that physically he was a magni¬ 
ficent specimen of a man, and his pictures bear out the 
statement—a great domed head with the prominent 
eye which is sometimes said to be the peculiar charac¬ 
teristic of the born orator. There are also some framed 
manuscripts in his handwriting, and letters of apprecia¬ 
tion from various admirers. Upstairs they show you the 
room where he was born, and this lias been furnished in 
accordance with the ideas of that day. In the rear is a 
fastidiously kept lawn and garden and I judge that in 
summer it must be indeed a lovely and peaceful spot. 
One thing is sure: his family, to whom I understand the 
village is indebted for the house, have made absolutely 
no effort to perpetuate his peculiar tenets. The 
framed quotations on the walls reflect not his bitterness 
toward Christianity but rather his kindliness toward 
men. Strangest of all, perhaps, the rules of the house 
which are conspicuously posted, are if anything rather 
more rigorous than govern a modern Y. M. C. A. 
building. For example no smoking is permitted. Also 
no games of chance may be played at any time and no 
games of any kind between Saturday night and Monday 
morning—strange rules perhaps in a shrine set up in 
memory of that once famous freethinker—I hear some 
one object because' they are too Puritanical. Moreover 
the village preacher tells me that he was invited to hold 
his prayer meeting there if for any reason it seemed 
desirable. 
* * * 
I have no slightest bit of sympathy with or compre¬ 
hension of his theological position. It was a pitiful 
thing that he gave up most of his splendid talents to 
gibes and taunts of the dearest hopes and loves of many 
men—but this remains: that in a degree which surely 
has never been surpassed he was master of our English 
tongue. No man living or dead has eclipsed him in his 
ability to marshal in orderly array all the battalions of 
speech. And men yet unborn will read and marvel at 
his, the stately, rolling music of his marching prose. 
He barely missed enduring fame, but the same easy 
facility of language which led him to make a jest of all 
that men held dear won for him no warmer name than 
“Bob”—and this bestowed in mockery rather than 
affection. 
Perhaps he was the greatest of “Idol Breakers” but 
after all, that is a ruthless sport which in the end does 
not pay. 
