Norwich bulletin., 1912-12-07


 Talking about ladders, man may be given half-a-dozen by his neigh Dore, all of good length and all in first class condition,-but he'll never get up to patch his leaky roof unless he uses them as they were meant to be used. He may pile them up under a shed and forget them; or he may stack them up around a tree and walk around them till they rot; or he may lean them up against the caves and then go fishing. But unless he climbs them, carrying his shingles and his hammer and his nails with him, they won't help towards mending the holes in the roof.
 In other words, a man isn't ever apt to get anywhere with both feet un- les he does 1t himself, of himself, by hitnselS and for himself. "Other mems, failures will never save you" ran the old hymn. Other mems boosting will never lift you where you ought to be unless you do your full share of it, yourself
 All Of which is just as true of farmers And their farming as of any other set of people. It doesn't make any diff ference how far Agricultural Depart rlents and Experiment Stations and Soil Surveys and feed or fertilizer in spection may go to help show the farmer what to do and how to do it, if he won't use his own brains and his own muscles to understand and utilize these helps they will do him no more good than if they had never been.
 What the farmer is too shiftless or too lazy or too needless to do for him. self won't be done for him, either by God or Nature ,or even by his we'll wishing friends.
 He who by the blow would thrive Himself must either hold or drive" said Poor Richard. And what Poor Richard said goes, in most cases.
 Of course, there are farmers and farmers. I'm not talking about all farmers, but about a certain-perhaps a small,-class, who spend much of their time whining because the govern ment doesn't do more for agriculture, and the rest of their time waiting for Somebody to come and do their work. Vet the truth is that governments, both national and state, are doing a vast deal more to help farmers help themselves than they arc doing for any other class of workers in the land. No government is trying to do farmers work for them ,and no government that is fit to endure ever will reach that stage of namby pambyism. But from one corner to the other the map is dotted thick with agricultural sta lions. maintained and paid for by gov ] ernment to help farmers solve their peculiar problems. These stations don't always work al you and I would , like them to; they probably don't al- ways work in the ideally wisest way You and l make mistakes; so do they They are no more infallible than we They don't understand all the laws of the universe nor comprehend all the secrets of Nature They don't pretend to. But they are able, with their trained staffs of experts and their big laboratories and their fields devoted solely to experimentations - they are able to get hold of a good many ideas and suggestions and some facts which. if intelligently applied in prac- tice by working farmers, might often save the latter from loss. or turn loss Into profit
 Eve just been looking over the re- port of the New York Experiment Sta ton on it's last inspection of feeding stuffs sold in that state. Every year representatives of this station go through the state from one end to the other buying whatever they find them offered fer sale, samples of the va rfous feeds offered to farmers for their stock. Last year 593 samples of as many differently named feeding stuffs were bought in this way at scattered stores ell over the state, from Long Island City to Tupper lake, and from HNlsdale 10 Buffalo. They were bought in big cities and in small ham, lets bought of retailers and of small mllers, bought whenever and wherever they could be found Then they were taken to the station and first carefully examined with micro- scopes to find out what they were made of Then they were analysed, to find what they were worth as food. i. e., as body building nutrients-Of course some of these, including such things as cottonseed meal. oil meal, malt sprouts. distillers' grains. gluten feeds, etc. were not susceptible to the mi crosc0pic examinations. They were ground too fine to make it possible to discover. that way, of what they were composed, But all were amenabie to analysis of their nHtritive values. And no less than 366 were in such a state that the microscope could and did tell just what was used in making them