The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1880-10-23 00:00:00

THE REASON WHY!

A clever article in the recent issue of the New York Tri.
Nine, by Mr. Edwin Taylor, described as "a successful young
farmer " by the Editor, explains why it is that the Ameri-
can farmer's boy deserts the farm :

"In considering this subject, let us begin at the
beginning—the Boy It is charged and conceded that
he deserts the farm. He rightly judges his future life
as a farmer by the past lives of his neighbours.
Looking over his careers, he sees a round of unevent-
ful toil, of hard getting and parsimonious saving.
He observes, that while the small farmer is reason-
ably certain of food and clothes, he is doubly sure
of not much more ; and that if he would increase his
business, he must fill his home with hirelings and
lead them in the field, making himself a servant of
servants, and his wife the keeper of an Irish boarding
house. I am supposing that the boy is an average
farmer's son, and that he confines these observations
to common 'broadcast' farming—excluding gar-
deners, sepi-growers, stockmen, specialists like Mr.
Dalrymple, the wheat king; Mr. Starr, of Echo
Farm; or Mr, Fell, deceased, the Newtown Pippin

millionaire, and especially leaving out of account
those amateur grangers whose profit in ether ventures
enables them to perform their agricultural labours
vicariously, giving sentimental writers erroneous
notions of 'how crops grow,' and inspiring them
with rose-coloured views of rural life. The boy, then,
son of the average farmer aforesaid, reading his in-
evitable future in the past of his friends, as I have
described it, encounters a paragraph like one in the
Tribune of February 20, which sets forth that a can-
vass of 100 representative professional and business
men in Springfield showed that 64, out of 88 report-
ing, were farmers' sons. When he looks on this
picture, and on this, is it 'strange that he ' deserts ? '
He has my sympathy and applause."

Then Mr. Taylor goes on to state that the farmer has not
the wherewithal to make an home attrantive to the young
man

"He is too poor; has been poor ever since my first
acquaintance with his fortunes, except in war times
or sea:sons of home-plenty and foreign famine; was
even wors. =off previously, aceording to the most
veracious histories; and, to my mind, has no rational
hope for an improvement in his condition without a
revolution in his business."
After quoting some official statistics in order to show
how little remains to the average American fanner after
paying the necessary outgoings, Mr. Taylor sums up as
follows:

"The inevitable conclusion from figures confirms
common observation, that plain farming just about
pays wages and taxes. What is there left, then, to
the average farmer, out of which to 'stick his farm for
the boys?' It is not so long since I was a farm-boy
that I have forgotten how that ambitious young per-
son longs for a brighter outlook; and I have now been
a farmer long enough to know how it is myself with
that much traduced individual. His traditional
Meanness and stinginess come of his 'hard up' con-
dition—an estate that causes many shortcomings.
Nor is he poor from perversity, obtuseness, or in-
dolence. He has the most powerful incentives in ail
this world to urge him to his best effort and I main-
tain not only does as well as the limitations of
human nature and his oircumstances admit of, but
quite as well as his critics, clerical, literary, or
scientific,' would do if put in his place. The fact
is, the farming of this country, taken as a whole, is,
in any commercial sense, a failure; and you can't
keep it from the boy. Neither can you quiet him
with that old, old racket about the dignity, antiquity,
and all that of farming. What is it to him that the
patriarchs were shepherds and husbandmen—that
'God Almighty first planted a garden,' in the noble
language of Bacon, or the farmer's close contact with
nature so insisted upon by Emerson? All these don't
help corn-growing a cent's worth. But give him a
recipe for snaking tillage profitable, as other callings
are profitable; set down for him, if you please, a com-
prehensive system of farming that will pay without
slaving, and the boy will 'stick' of his own accord."