Norwich bulletin., 1918-06-28

sc1ined to charge Tuck or Providence or some other outside agency with \ capriciousness. Too many of us blame the Lord for our bellyaehes when the truth. is that the good Lord never sent a bellyaehe to any human being, till that being had first pre- pared the way and planted the germs ana supplied the cause for it, by his own erapulence or gulosity. (There's a chance for the dictionary!3
 There's always cause for every good crop that is raised by any farmer. There's always a cause for every bad crop. It is absolutely inn possible toafconceiEe of either one without such a cause.
 What is it?
 That ought ito be the first question for every farmer to ask. Did his po tatoes sturn out extra good Then his business is to find out why, if he can,-and do it again, if he is able. If they turned out poorly, the same question is in order.
 Now don't assume that anybody is holding you always and everywhere responsible for every crop success or crop failure. Sometimes the cause of either may lie outside your juris-s diction. Sometimes you may do your part in full and to the uttermost, and | yet obtain poor results from causes | which you couldn't control. Then you're not to blame. But there are. scores and hundreds and thousands of cases of poor crops where the farmer may, if he is honest with himself, find 1 the contributing or impellding causes | in his own failure to do his own part towards producing good ones. One can never tell what the cause of any effect is till he has hunted it i down. It isn't always an easy thing 1 to do,-that hunting down a hidden, ] lurking, deep seated cause. The thing to remember is that it is always there somewhere. and that true farm ing ability is shown in the shrewd- ness with which you search for it and the pertinacity with which you keep up the hunt. The fact that, it may prove to be something outside of the l farmers control, doesn't excuse him from, at least, trying to find it. For i it may, equally as likely, prove to have been his own failure or fault. | And that he can amend. next time.
 To some of us, this very un- certainty of our vocation is one of l pears, including bugbears. are liable to come trapseing over our reservations. any time. When we've hunted 'em down, laid the bugbears away in cam phor, killed the killable kind, and
 discovered the lairs of the rest. we've done something that counts Per ! haps not with the particular erop
 they've ruined but with the next
 crop we're going to put in.
 No farmer can insure invariably
 good crops. To make any such claim
 would be to invite a commission de
 ally can find out,-and it's his busi-
 ness to.-what are the causes of good
 crops or poor crops. If he can and
 does accomplish this, he has started
 paving way straight out to Easy Street. When he finds himself abso-
 lutely unable to root out the cause,- when he comes up whack against the
 Unknown and the Unknowable, there's
 no disgrace in his owning himself
 stumped and beaten.
 But that won't happen every time
 II one is sincere and shrewd.
 The thing to do is to find the cause for every poor crop. If it turns out
 to have been hopelessly unsuitable soil c1 phenomenally bad weather, 1 why, then, there's no more to be said or done.
 But if as is much more likely, it
 turns out to have been-something which you can amend or remedy, then the thing to do is to get at it with a pick or a shovel or. a dung-fork or a load of lime or better seed or better
 tlith or some other means within human control.
 We've all heard of people said to dig their own graves with their teeth. There's no excuse for the farmer
 who doesn't at least try to dig out the
 causes for his own failures even if
 he has to go at the digging with his
 teeth.
 Said an old Latin poet, two thous- land years aso:-"Happy is the man
 who knows the causes of things, and ,1 has been fear under his feet." @e THE FARMER.