Norwich bulletin., 1915-03-13

needed to supply his own wants. In- deed, his farm was so hilly that cultl- vation would have been hardly poss1- and hilIocks simply rioted in turf Of short, sweet pasture grasses. year | after year. They seemed to have been made to grow that sort or stun. Ana l they certainly did grow it!
 Over in Maine I have seen other farms which simply hungered and l thirsted for the chance to produce po- l tatoes. Perhaps they might have sup ported COWS, after a fashion, but they cheerfully rolled out ten dollars worth l of potatoes. any year, in return for | less work than would have been re- quired to net one dollar from any dairy.
 l One doesn't need to cross state boundaries to see differences in farm | lands. One doesn't even need to cross 1 town lines. or go off his own farm. | Dirt is dirt, undeniably, but there
 are a great many kinds of dirt, and each one is apt to have its own crop | producing capacity.
 1 One important phase of really good farming is to find out what your dirt
 wants to do. and then humor it, as 1 far as possible One can always get more out of willing helper than he 1 can out of a driven slave. Naturally, other things are to be considered. | There are your own tastes and ablh- ties, to begin with. Over and over again have preached the necessity of taking them into account. It is | worse than folly for a farmer with dairying in his blood to try to make | truck-gardener of himself. Probably
 he can do it, in time, but the result | will be more or less of a misfit, at the 1 best, and it will cost more than it will l be worth.
 l But when the man who was made | for a dairyman and who has a farm | that is peculiarly adapted to dairying l tries to turn that farm into a truck patch while trying, at the same time, 1 to make himself over into a market
 gardener--then failure is as certain
 as anything can be in this world. | We all have to do what We don't
 want to, rather frequently. Admitting l that, and admitting that sometimes
 ma rket conditions require us to call ] on our farms to do something they don't want to. either, the fact remains ] that the best success in farming will l be likely to come to the farmer who l fitted for, on the farm best suited to 1 that kind of farming.
 Conditions in this world are not aI- ways of our own making and too often we have to accept them and make the
 
 and the more l see of farms and far n1ers, the more convinced I become that one of the most frequent distinc- tions between farm success and farm failure is to be found in the mal- adaptation of methods as well as men. l The farmer who, first knowing what he can do best proceeds to find out what his farm will do best, and who then combines the two knowledges
 into one compromise science. has started on the road to success. He may not reach it even then. As has been said before this, "Tis not in mor- tals to command success. But they can deserve it, and deserving wins oftener than deserving. Market disposal of the crops you and your 1 farm agree in wanting to produce. Weather freakishness may bother you. There are numerous chances of fall ure under any conditions, even the best.
 But the fact remains that the far mer who makes an ally of his farm
 and works with it so far as 1t will
 work with. him, has got a better hold on Dame Fortunes skirts than the one who tries to dragoon his unwilling
 acres into something which is not na- tural to them.
 Even when the markets are inE1ospi- table, 1t sometimes happens that they car be circumvented. They tell the
 story of two farmers out in Nebraska, owning adjoining farms of the same size and practically the same sort of soil. Both raise corn and good corn, too. Last year each raised over | ninety bushels to the acre. That's a good yield, anywhere. Farmer A sold his for seventy-fVe cents a bushel as it stood in the field. Which was con- | sidered a pretty good price, too. And
 yet he came out of the year barely
 even. He had sharp work to make both ends meet. Farmer B didn't sell his corn as corn. He sold it as pork. And his books showed that it brought
 him in $1.53 a bushel, that way tseVenty-eight cents bushel more than his neighbor.
 In this case, both men had good corn farms and both were skillful corn growers. The combination brought success to one but not to the other. It won't do to say that any one method or any one system will always succeed. But, taking things as they
 are and considering farms as they av- craze, it is safe to say that the farmer who learns his farm and works with 1t along it's natural lines, stands bet ter chance of winning out than the one who 'bout-faces it from It's natural attitude and tries to bully it into doing something it doesn't want to do at all and can't do well. \ THE FARMER.