Vermont Watchman And State Journal

Agricultural.

APROPOS OF FARMERS.

I know a farmer who has but fifteen acres of land, off of which he supports his family—he continues to get forty bushels of wheat from an acre of land, and fifty to seventy bushels of Indian corn, besides corn-fodder in abundance, and hay; and instead of impoverishing his land by these heavy crops, such is his economy in saving, making, and applying his manures, that his farm grows richer. This farmer applies his knowledge of figures to his own calling.—He says he cannot afford to grow half a crop, as the deterioration in fences, and the interest of money on the land is the same, crop or half a crop. It is needless to say that this man takes two agricultural papers.

I know another farmer who has seventy-eight acres of land, a fine calcareous clay loam, ameliorated by quartz and limestone pebbles, with a sprinkling of small boulders. He barely subsists his family in a very primitive way, on the avails of his seventy-eight acres. His corn-field is plowed, or rather half plowed, late in the spring, the weeds run a race with the late planted corn, until late in June, when the hoe and the plow give the stunted plant the end of the race. Now comes a drought; the already enfeebled plants have no organic power to make the extra heat available: hence they are pinched by the very influence which gives fruition to a well-tended and early planted field. But the drought has at least served this man with an excuse for his short crop of Indian corn; thus saving his pride at the expense of his pocket. His wheat fallow is a little better managed than his corn-field, but his crop is always foul, sometimes short, and the grains are generally shrunken. To bring the year about without running into debt, this man pinches his family in the ordinary comforts of civilization; go to his house in a winter's day, ten to one he is asleep on his bed, or sitting cosily by the fire. Ask him to subscribe for an agricultural paper, and he is no longer cosy; all the Goth and Vandal in him is aroused. "I want no book to teach me how to farm. Look at my neighbor Progress, he is a book farmer. What use are his Durhams, and Berkshires, and all his big crops; he spends it all; it only makes his family proud; how mad it makes me to see his children sent by here every day to the village school." I do not retort upon this man the fact that his district school cannot be respectably sustained, because the district contains too many such men as himself. I let him alone in his glory. I assail no man, who, like the hedge-hog, is armed at all points.

I know another farmer, a mild, quiet German, who seems instinctively to have that German love of the beautiful and true, which is only an acquired taste with us restless Americans. While we strain after the ultimate good, they quietly improve that which is within their reach. This man's farm gives an earnest of the industry and good sense of its proprietor. Not a thistle nor a brier, no alder fences; all is neat, clean and arable. The house rather plain; if it displays no taste, neither is it like too many of our fine farm houses,—a caricature on all orders, and good taste to boot. The barn is large, well ventilated, with painted blinds; the fences permanent and strong: what is lacking about these premises in ornament, is amply made up in neatness, and the appearance of positive comfort. The man modestly says "Ioh can night guth Eng lish lezen." Still he takes the papers, and the well thumbed leaves of his last year's Cultivator, show that its contents have been understandingly read by him.

I know another farmer, a gentleman, a scholar, and a christian, so far as the fashionable modification of christianity will admit. He complains that he cannot farm by book, because his hired men object to the drudgery of the prescribed preparations. He speaks twice to his horses, where he condescends to speak once to his men. Yet, strange to say, he boasts of the cleverness of his horses, while he complains of the intractability of his men!

I know yet another farmer, a book farmer, if you please, a beginner, but an enthusiast in his calling. He soon found that he could do nothing by way of improvement, without awakening in the mind of his head man, or factotum, an enthusiasm akin to his own. This man at first demurred to hauling swamp muck into the barn yard, lest it should spoil the manure. Now he has become an ardent student in vegetable economy, and in the philosophy of vegetable growth and nutrition, as it is taught in the agricultural papers of the day. Here is at least one laboring man, exalted from the character of a mercenary drudge to be a respectable co-worker with the chemist in his laboratory, and on a grander scale.—S. W., in the Albany Cultivator.