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Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
to check out faster than he puts in, and that is the case with many 
of our farmers to-day, their accounts with their bank—the soil—has 
been overdrawn, and if they do not deposit soon, bankruptcy and 
ruin must inevitably overtake them. The idea advanced is an ex¬ 
cellent one, and one we all should profit by. 
Mr. Main: I have spent a great deal of my life in trying to get 
farmers to meet and. exchange ideas. I found it was among the 
hardest things I ever attempted. I have concluded that the only 
chance is to show them by actual experiment. There is a part of 
creation who can never understand anything by reading. If they 
see you perform a thing, if they see you cultivate a tree, they will 
probably imitate it and cultivate that tree as well or better than 
you can; but you can sit down and spend a week telling them how 
to cultivate that tree, and they will never understand. I think the 
best thing for those who can understand without seeing the actual 
experiment, is to go forward and do these things, and allow them 
to learn in their own way. 
Mr. Anderson: The paper I think is not an overdrawn picture 
of a great many farmers in this country. [ think it is a very 
faithful picture, and represents a great many such farmers. There 
are a great many such farmers all over the country, more so in the 
west than in the east. In the east the farmers haven’t been so neg¬ 
ligent; many of them have been settled on farms for a generation. 
There is no doubt that it is a sad picture. A good many farmers 
in the west do not think they are running down their capital 
as rapidly as they are. They don’t think their farm is their savings- 
bank, and every deposit there is to their credit, and every draft up¬ 
on the bank is taking from their capital. I saw a statement awhile 
ago that a farmer bought a farm at $10 an acre, two hundred acres, 
paying one-half down, and the other $4,000 he went in debt for. 
He thought he would not spend much on the farm, and pay it off 
as soon as possible. He put in wheat all he could. He had a good 
crop, and was enabled to pay his interest. The second year he put 
it all in wheat again, spent no money, couldn’t atford to buy stock 
and improve his farm. He made a few hundred dollars less the second 
year, and paid his inteiest. The third year he was not more than 
able to pay his interest, and from that on he found his interest was 
all that he could pay. At the end of seven or eight years he found 
his farm had so depreciated that it was not worth more than the 
