Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1910-12-08
"Farmers" and Farmers.

Farmers" and Farmers.
An optimistic neighhor : busts off
some buttons in its efforts to pat tho
on the back. The Kansas City
Journal says:
FALLEN in pleasant places these piping
times of peace and high prices-high
prices for everything he produces to
sell and low prices for nearly every
thing he has to buy. a decade or so
ago farming was one of the most
toilsome of occupations; today
through the fundamentally of i'm
proved implements and scientific
methods it has risen almost to the
ease and comfort Of a pleasant pas
time requiring hardly more labor
than game of golf. True, the farm
er who resides on his farm-a great
many do not-still suffers some Of
the. isolation which formerly made
his condition and that OF his family
one of comparative loneliness; but
even so, good roads and automobiles
and nearly every Western farmer
these days possesses one or more
devil wagons"-are annihilating
time and space, and the organization
Of social clubs. or residence in town,
is fast dispelling this world-old curse
Of farm life"
Many farmer will smile at an cdi-
tors conception of this soft snap
farming. Farming is certainly health
full exercise and game Of golf may
be made hard work. but if our Mis-
souri, friend has been shown that all a
farmer has to do is figure the saving
to be made in buying automobiles at
wholesale instead of small lots Of half
dozen or SO at q time, he has been
started wrong. He had better join
q farmers organization of some sort,
or take 4 vacation from his own ardu-
Gus tasks and rest up by giving his
services to q farmer. OF course we
here in Maine are not boring holes
with such big augurs as they do in the
West, but farming has lots of back
aches and blisters, in any part of the
country. The gentleman farmer
who goes into it as means of spend
ing his surplus wealth and seeing
what wonders he may coax from
Dame Nature, is not a farmer. He is
an expcrimcntcr who hires some one
who knows more than he docs>to tell
him how, and others to do the work.
That may be the pleasant pastimc'
shown the Missouri editor, but the
real farmer, the man who digs his
sustenance out of the soil and wastes
his brain cells to invent methods of
making two pumpkins grow where
only one grew before, gets rhcuma-
tism, calloused hands and bumped up
back. In spite Of the joys of his oc-
cupation and its playsomc exercise,
there's good hard work in plenty on
the farm.
The average farmer, the country
over, does more real manual labor
than any other class and, if things arc
coming his way for Il time, he deserves
it. The professions and the multiple
businesses prospcred when it was q
rub and u go to root living out of
the soil. With better prices for his
produce the rest of the world sets up a
howl that it is being starved to death
and blames it on the farmer instead
of where it belongs on it's own cx-
travagance.
The farmer is just coming into his
rights. He is attaining what city
folk have had for years and he has
heard about with neutrality-suspicious.
daily papers, magazines, heated homes
and bath rooms. The loneliness of
his occupation is dissipatcd and he has
discovered that he is entitled to q
vacation-a hunting or fishing trip, or
family picnic-as much as is his friend
who comes down from the city to
board.
But the real farmer is not farming
his acres by telephone, or taking his
eggs and butter to market in an auto
mobile; he Is at home attending to
business IA hours day and then do
iofr Gfbc rborocp