2S4 Wisconsin state agricultural society. 
vators of the soil is a more thorough and scientific knowledge of 
their business. It is not enough that you should know how to 
work, and to work well. Most, if not all of you know that now. 
And right here is, I think, one of the greatest faults of our farm¬ 
ers. They work too hard, and do not give themselves sufficient 
time for study, and for obtaining the information they so much need. 
You can hire men to drive the mower and the reaper as well as 
you can, to hold the plow as steady as you can, to seed a field as 
evenly and as well as you can. In short, there is but very little 
hard work upon the farm but what hired men can be taught to do 
and to do well. 
If farmers cannot average more than 13 or 14 bushels of wheat 
per acre, 31 or 32 bushels of oats, and less than 35 bushels of 
corn or 2,900 pounds of hay, which is the case to-day in Wiscon¬ 
sin, then I am ready and willing to admit that you cannot afford 
to hire your work done, and more than that, that the time will 
come when you cannot afford even to stay upon your farms and 
do the work yourselves. Gentlemen, farms have a very quiet 
way of getting rid of their owners in such cases. Let me illus¬ 
trate this. When I was a boy, there was a farm in my native 
neighborhood, which my father and others said was the best grain 
farm in that part of the township. But the owner of it always 
insisted and argued that farming did not pay. He could make 
more money at anything else, than he could at his farm, and he 
acted upon this belief. I do not think he ever planted or sowed 
a crop either in good season or in good order. His cultivation 
was still worse than his planting. As to his harvesting, he had 
but very little of it to do. When his barn-yard became so bad 
that either the barn or the manure must be moved, he succeeded 
in getting the manure put upon the land in such a manner as to 
double or triple his crop of weeds, which was always large, even 
in the poorest of seasons. The result of the whole was, that 
years ago his farm utterly refused to support him even in pov¬ 
erty, and he is to-day an old man of 95 years, totally blind, with¬ 
out one dollar in the world, and living entirely upon the charity 
of his friends. Forty years since, most of his neighbors adopted 
a system of improvement in their farming, and the result is, that 
where it has been followed up, to-day they are all of them either 
