The Lafayette gazette. [volume] (Lafayette, La.) 1893-1921, 1896-02-29
FARMER Ax6 PLANTER
THE F1aMER.s PROFESSION.

FARMER AND PLANTER.
THE FaRMER.s PROFESSION.
9JFcol Can be . Farmer. but 81. Fool
Can not be . Gocd Farmer
l. The time has come when the wcrd
profession, ss applied to the farmers
| business, means something. The old
| saying, that t'any fool can be q farm
| err" is true, but there is great and In.
creasing force of truth in the modern
maxim that ga fool can not be q good
farmer" Any fool can be q lawyer,
and q large percentage of the idiots
that cumber the earth have undoubt-
eddy reached out in that direction. but
the close, hard work of the professions
requires a well-trained brain in a
sound body. The lawyer destitute
OF energy or sense goes to the wall
| and is laid to a financial rest in the
| fame last ditch with the incom-
petent farmer, and the same blan-
ket of debt covers their unfortu-
nate remains. Farms are no more
properly asylums for human failures
than law offices, diss ecting rooms, or
the thronged halls of commerce and
trade. Farming has become an occu-
patton for brains as we'll as muscle.
Inventive genius has turned the bust
ness bottom inward and inside out
during the last so years. The true
Phi1osophic spirit which first saw day
In Lord Bacon is turning a flood of
light upon every principle and detail
of the farmers vocation, from the proc
esses of plant life to the killing of po-
tato bugs. That spirit of inquiry, of
research, of painstaking investigation
is constantly at work, undermining
and blowing up popular humbugs, lay
ing firmly and deeply in right reason
and sound sense the foundations of
n 1<,rvp o1s~
leads in every direction for the
golden grains of truth that may enrich
and beautify the farmers profession.
For farming is profession. It was
not in the middle ages when tillers Of
the soil we're looked upon as human
vermin and christendom applauded
Ignorance and knightly butchery; it is
not to-day in Mexico, where q forl<ed
stick serves as a plow and where it is
almost a sin against the Holy Ghost to
have new idea. But in this country,
where intelligent labor is honored,
and where laboratories and colleges
and experiment stations and newspa-
pers and the active brains of the farm
ers themselves are constantly moving
the business to a higher and broader
plan it is a profession of such possibili-
ties that no man should take its name
lightly. It requires health, energy,
knowledge, sense and grit to be good
farmer. do not believe that a natural
taste for business is absolutely nee
essary for the successful farmer. A
man can be a good minister, or book
agent. or politician, or woman's rights
man, even if he doesn't like it.. There
may be a little. waste of talent, per-
haps, in the clash of sentiment, but
grit can fill that gap and the man sue
of imagery and song, but the
farmer who is born into the require
ments of his business is as scarce rs
angels among the business men of Chi
cago. A business like farming, which
gives play to taste, fancy, invention,
originality in thinking and working,
can safely be called a profession. The
man who pounds stones upon the high
way has no profession. There is notil-
ing in the business to call into play
his mental powers, and but few of
his physical. The workers in the
mills and factories of the coun-
try move in the deepest and mar
Numberless farmers drifting around in
the backwaters of by-gone practices
and ideas have no profession, but the
active. progressive, thinking man, who
finds in the accumulated knowledge of
agriculture food for his memory, and
in the changing seasons and fluctuat-
ing markets, the ups and downs of the
commercial barometer, subjects for his
reason, and in the unexplorel myser-
les of the soil subjects for enthusiastic
research, has a profession for which no
a bi1ities are too great, and no mental
culture can be too thorough. The
profession has the same in,
herent nobility that any other respect
able occupation has and no more.
Honest labor in any calling, whether
in making shoes, selling calico, editing
preaching the gospel,
counting a girl, driving mules, or run
ming great railroad corporation has
the same stamp of Divine approval.
III. c. Adams, in Farmers Review.
THE BENEFiCENT LEGUME.