The farmer and mechanic. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1877-1885, 1879-07-10

1t is pitifu; to see how men act in these
matters. They have not the least faith in
honest dealing with the soil. Their eff,rt
is to cheat the land-cheat nature-out of
a living. They have as little faith in the
natural reward of good agriculture as sin
ners have in the spiritual reward of good
moral culture. They fear to trust the soil
to return them fair play for good treatment.
They fear that if they should properly till
a field they would lose both manure and
labor. Why is this timidity Part of it,
no doubt, comes from conscious incapacity
for the business in which they are engaged
But this is not always so. Men who are
capable of raising large crops aud raising
them with profit, will not habitually follow
that kind of farming. Having done it
once-having dared once to sufficiently fit
a field for grain or roots of grass. and hav-
ing received their reward, they seem to
stand frightened at the result, to doubt its
reality, to regard it as though it was a
prize drawn IN a lottery, an event of chance
that could not be relied on to repeat itself
1t is sometimes two or three wears before
they summon courage to renew the experi-
ment. Sometimes they never repeat 1t. bnt
content themselves for the rest of their
lives with telling about that big crop of
corn or hay or potatoes they once raised.
Now, this is not farming. Farming is a
legitimate business; not a hazardous specu-
latlOn. We have a promise which can be
relied upon that seed-time and harvest shall
not fail, and a world wide record of expe-
rience to show that the faithful. earnest
labor of the husbandman is ALWAYS
rewarded. Either one or the other
of two things upon the farm is true
that the labor, care and manure expended
upon a crop to bring it to a high degree of
perfection will pay. or that no less outlay of
either will pay. If the use of one load of
manure where there ought to be two. and
Of one days work where there ought to be
two, will pay a profit, the second load and
the second day will pay a greater profit up
to "a certain limit. If it pays a man to put
out his own labor on a piece of land, and
that labor is not all the crop requires to
perfect it, it will pay him still better to hire
another man to help him. The second
mans labor, in such a case, always pays
better than the firsts. If the result will
not pay for both, it does not pay for either,
and the first MAJ ought to 90 at something
else. And it is just the same of manure as
of tillage, and just the same in the care and
feeding of live stock. An insufficient ex-
penditure in either of these directions IS a
wastetul, losing expenditure, whether it be
of labor or Of capital.
The greatest cause Of this kind Of lad
farming is the possession of too much land
in proportion to capital. A farmer cannot
bring himself to reduce his land under til
lage in proportion to his ability to supply
manure and pay for labor, because he fears
that he cannot get a living from SO little
land" And here, as we began by saying,
is the fundamentnl mistake. We do not
get our living from the land; we get 1t
from the labor and capital laid out on the
land. This concentration of effort upon
small areas of soil is something little under
stood in America. II it were, we should
to-day see fewer m%ortgaged farms, and fewer
Sad-faced men and women tOlling hopeless
Y upon them. From this point of view.
we cannot but think it would be better II
we had no legalized credit system in Ameri
ca. Then the young farmer could buy nc
more land than he could pay cash for, and
would have to make the money from that
before be could buy more. What a lesson
this would be in economy and agriculture