The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1889-07-10
About New England Farming.


squealing, and it is the non-progressive,
unintelligent, lazy farmers who insist
that farming don't pay" Poor farm
ing pays just as well as poor shoe
making, poor carpentering and poor
blacksmithing. But there never was
time or a place when good farming
really paid any better than it pays
in New England now. Some will say
it paid better during the war, and it is
true that prices were nominally much
higher and sales of farm products
brisker. The rapid depreciation of the
currency was very advantageous to
indebted farmers, who got prices made
by the new and inflated conditions and
could pay off their indebtedness in
forty-cent and fifty-cent dollars. Every
careful farmer who did this, and re-
fused to go in debt for property at the
initiation prices then current, really did
do better during the war than he can
do now. But the farmers who were
not in debt could make no use of this
opportunity to make one dollar do the
work of two in clearing off incum-
brances. They got good prices, but
they paid enormously for everything
they had to buy, and fair comparison
between those times and these will
prove that we can exchange our sur
plus products for as much as then, and
usually that of better quality.
Farming on worn land has got to the
point where knowledge, energy and
business habits are required to make it
a success. Those farmers who do not
take the agricultural papers and study
them, who go to the circus, but not to
the agricultural meetings, are not all
getting along well. They never did
get along very well, but probably they
are getting along less well than usual,
as consumers can get better stuff than
they produce from their neighbors who
study their trade. In every town in
New England there are farmers who
are laying up money, or paying off
debts contracted in starting. If some
can do this, why not the rest? The
same state of things exists in all
other lines of business. Incompetent
merchants, manufacturers, mechanics,
lawyers, doctors and preachers are
all complaining that their occupation
don't pay, right alongside of others,
with no better chances, who seem to
have no complaints to make. AS to
the " run-out " farms, if they ever were
good for anything they are good now.
Those fellows who have run off after
the pots of gold at the western end of
the rainbows never had enough!get up
to them to seriously injure any good
land they happened to have here. We
know man who two years ago bought
one of these run-out" farms, and
last year cleared over $500 in cash on
the potatoes he grew on part of it.
New England is lousy" with chances
for enterprising business farmers to dc
as well on the land (and better) than
they can do with the same capital
otherwise invested East or West. We
have got the markets right here, and
though our railroad managers have mo-
all of them got as much sense as they
ought to have, in regard to encourag
ing the farmers by low rates to grow
larger crops for shipment, they are
probably as sensible in their way as the
average farmer is in his.
The state assessors of New York sa,
that everywhere farm land is depreci
ating in value, while city property il
constantly approaching. 81 do no
see," says one of the assessors, IAN,
way in which improvement may be ex
pected. No one wants to buy sifarn
lands because no one can get thei
money out of them. In few year
you will see more tenant farmers thar
anything else" He went on to sa,
that the New York farmers could no
compete with the West. This is tn
case not only in grain and cereals, Blu
in dairy products. Western butte
now gets the best of the trade in NeV
York city, where but few years az
the home producers had monopoly
This is said to be true of the Mohaw
valley counties-where are the grea
dairy producers of the state-as well a
the cereal counties.of Western Ne,
York and the mountainous countie
of the northern part of the state
But now why can not New York farm
ers compete with the West? Hur
dreds-yes, thousands-of them Gel
tainly are doingso. Wepersonally kno'
farmers in every. New England stat
and in New York who are maxim
money right along in farming, an
they have no advantage whatever owe
thair orOaninp nai0h hOrs pvcent ths