What I know of farming Part 14

I have been having much plowing done this Fall--in my orchards, for what I presume to be the good of the trees; on my drained swamp, because it is not yet fully subdued and sweetened, and I judge that the Winter's freezing and thawing will aid to bring it into condition. And then my swamp lies so low and absolutely flat that the thaws and rains of Spring render plowing it in season for Oats, or any other crop that requires early seeding, a matter of doubt and difficulty. All the land I now cultivate, or seek to cultivate, has already been well plowed more than once; no stump or stone impedes progress in the tracts I have plowed this Fall; yet a good plow, drawn by two strong yoke of oxen, rarely breaks up half an acre per day; and I estimate two acres per week about what has been averaged, at a cost of $18 for the plowman and driver; offsetting the oxen's labor against the work done by the men at the barn and elsewhere apart from plowing. In other words: I am confident that my plowing has cost me, from first to last, at least, $10 per acre, and would have cost still more if it had been done as thoroughly as it ought. I am quite aware that this is high--that sandy soils and dry loams are plowed much cheaper; and that farmers who plow wall (with whom I do not rank those who scratch the earth to a depth of four or five inches) do it at a much lower rate. Still, I estimate the average cost in this country of plowing land twelve inches deep at $5 per acre; and I am confident that it does not cost one cent less.

Nor is cost the only discouragement. There is not half so much nor so thorough plowing among us, especially in the Fall; as there should be.

The soil is, for a good part of the time, too dry or too wet; the weather is inclement, or the ground is frozen: so the plow must stand still. At length, the signs are auspicious; the ground is in just the right condition; and we would gladly plow ten, twenty, fifty acres during the brief period wherein it remains so; but this is impossible.

Others want to improve the opportunity as well as we; extra teams are rarely to be had at any price; and our own slow-moving oxen refuse to be hurried. Standing half a mile off, you can see them move; if your eye-sight is keen, and you have some stationary object interposed whereby to take an observation; but it is as much as ever. If your soil is such that you can use horses, you get on, of course, much faster; but all that you gain in breadth you are apt to lose in depth. There may be spans that will take the plow right along though you sink it to the beam; but they are sure to be slow travelers. I never knew a span that would plow an acre per day as I think it should be plowed; though, if your only object be to get over as much ground as possible, you may afflict and t.i.tillate two acres, or as much more as you please.

Now, I have before me a letter to _The Times_ (London) by Mr. William Smith, of Woolston, Bucks, who states that he has just harvested his fifteenth annual crop cultivated by steam-power, and has prepared his land for the sixteenth; and he gives details, showing that he breaks up and ridges heavy clay soils at the rate of six acres per day, and plows lands already in tillage at the rate of fully nine acres per day. He gives the total cost, (including wear and tear,) of breaking up a foot deep and ridging 65 acres in September and October in this year, 1870, at 20 _6s. 6d._ or about $100 in gold: call it $112 in our greenbacks, and still it falls considerably below $2 (greenbacks) per acre. Say that labor and fuel are twice as dear in this country as in England, and this would make the cost of thoroughly pulverizing by steam-power a heavy clay soil to a depth of twelve inches less than $4 per acre here. I do not believe this could be done by animal power at $10 per acre, not considering the difficulty of getting it thoroughly done at all. Mr.

Smith pertinently says: "Horse-power could not give at any cost such valuable work as this steam-power ridging and subsoiling is." He tills 166 acres in all, making the cost of steam-plowing his stubble-land _4s.

8-1/2d._ per acre (say $1.30 greenback). And he gives this interesting item:

"No. 5, light land, 12 acres, was ridge-plowed and subsoiled last year for beans: that operation left the land, after the bean-crop came off, in so nice a state, that cultivating once over with horses, at a cost of _2s._ per acre, was all that was needed this Autumn for wheat next year.

The wheat was drilled four days back."

--Now I am not commending Steam as the best source of power in aid of Agriculture. I hope we shall be able to do better ere long. I recognize the enormous waste involved in the movement of an engine, boiler, etc., weighing several tons, back and forth across our fields, and apprehend that it must be difficult to avoid a compression of the soil therefrom.

A stationary engine and boiler at either end of the field, hauling a gang of plows this way and that by means of ropes and pulleys, must involve a very heavy outlay for machinery and a considerable cost in its removal from farm to farm, or even from field to field. Either of these may be the best device yet perfected; but we are bound to do better in time.

Precisely how and when the winds which sweep over our fields shall be employed to pulverize and till the soil, are among the many things I do not know; but, that the end will yet be achieved, I undoubtingly trust.

I know somewhat--not much--of what has been done and is doing, both in Europe and America, to extend and diversify the utilization of wind as a source of power, and to compress and retain it so that the gale which sweeps over a farm to-night may afford a reserve or fund of power for its cultivation on the morrow or thereafter. I know a little of what has been devised and done toward converting and transmitting, through the medium of compressed air, the power generated by a waterfall--say Niagara or Minnehaha--so that it may be expended and utilized at a distance of miles from its source, impelling machinery of all kinds at half the cost of steam. I know vaguely of what is being done with Electricity, with an eye to its employment in the production of power, by means of enginery not a tenth so weighty and c.u.mbrous as that required for the generation and utilization of Steam, and by means of a consumption (that is, transformation) of materials not a hundredth part so bulky and heavy as the water and steam which fill the boilers of our factories and locomotives. I am no mechanician, and will not even guess from what source, through what agencies, the new power will be vouch-safed us which is in time to pulverize our fields to any required depth with a rapidity, perfection, and economy, not now antic.i.p.ated by the great body of our farmers. But my faith in its achievement is undoubting; and, though I may not live to see it, I predict that there are readers of this essay who will find the forces abundantly generated all around us by the spontaneous movement of Wind, Water, and Electricity--one or more, and probably by all of them--so utilized and wielded as to lighten immensely the farmer's labor, while quadrupling its efficiency in producing all by which our Earth ministers to the sustenance and comfort of man.

XLVIII.

RURAL DEPOPULATION.

Complaint is widely made of a decrease in the relative population of our rural districts; and not without reason, or, at least, plausibility. I presume the Census of 1870 will return no more farmers in the State of New York, and probably some fewer in New England, than were shown by the Census of 1860. The very considerable augmentation of the number of their people will be found living wholly in the cities and incorporated villages. I doubt whether there are more farmers in the State of New York to-day than there were in 1840, though the total population has meantime doubled. Many farms have been transformed into country-seats for city bankers, merchants, and lawyers; others have been consolidated, so that what were formerly two or three, now const.i.tute but one; and, though every body says, "Our farms are too large for our capital," "We run over too much land," etc., etc., yet, I can hear of few farms that have been, or are expected to be, divided, except into village or city lots; while the prevalent tendency is still the other way. An inefficient farmer dies heavily in debt, or is sold out by the sheriff: his farm is rarely divided between two purchasers, while it is quite often absorbed into the estate of some thrifty neighbor; and thus small farmers are selling out and moving westward much oftener than large ones. Such are the obvious facts: now for some of the reasons:

I. Our State, like New England, was originally all but covered by a heavy growth of forest. The removal of this timber involved very much hard work, most of which has been done in this century, and much of it by the present generation. When I first traversed Chautauqua County, forty-three years ago, from two-thirds to three-fourths of her acres must have been still covered with the primeval forest--a tall, heavy growth of Beech, Maple, Hemlock, White Pine, etc., which yielded very slowly to the efforts of the average chopper. Many a pioneer gave half his working hours for twenty years to the clearing off of Timber, Fencing, cutting out roads, etc., and had not sixty acres in arable condition at the last. Outside of the villages, the population of that county was probably as great in 1830 as it is to-day, though the annual production of her tillage was not half what it now is. Her farms are now made; her remaining woodlands are worth about as much per acre as her tillage; there is now comparatively little timber-cutting, or land-clearing; and two-thirds of the pioneers, or their sons who inherited their farms, have sold out, or been sold out, and pushed further westward. Meantime, Grazing and Dairying have extensively supplanted Grain-growing; and farmers who found more work than they could do on 60 or 80 acres, now manage 160 to 320 acres with ease. I do not say that they ought not to farm better; I only state the facts that they thrive by this dairy-farming, and are not exhausting their lands.

And what is true of Chautauqua is measurably true of half the rural Counties in our State.

II. Formerly, Wood was the only fuel known to our farmers, while immense quant.i.ties of it were burned in our cities, at the salt-works, etc. At present, wood is scarcely used for fuel, except as kindling, in any of our cities, villages, or manufactories, while the consumption of Coal by our farmers is already very large, and rapidly extending. All this reduces the demand for labor on our farms and in our forests, while increasing the corresponding demand in the Coal Mines, and on the railroads. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, has doubled her population within the last twelve or fourteen years; and this at the expense of our rural districts.

III. Our agricultural implements and machinery grow annually more effective, and at the same time more costly. The outfit of a good farm costs five-fold what it did forty years ago. The farmer makes and secures his Hay far more rapidly and effectively than his father did, but pays far more for Reapers, Mowers, Rakers, etc.; in other words, he makes Winter work abridge that of Summer--makes a hundred days' work in some village or city save thrice as many days' work on his farm. This enhances his profits, but swells our urban, while it diminishes our rural population.

IV. Much has been said of the degeneracy and increasing sterility of the New England Puritan stock. All this is shallow and absurd. There never before were so many people who proudly traced their origin to a New England ancestry as now. What is true in the premises is this: The New England stock is becoming very widely diffused, and is giving place, to a considerable extent, to other elements in its original home. Forty years ago, at least seven-eighths of the inhabitants of Boston were of New England birth and lineage; now, hardly half are so. The descendants of the Pilgrims are scattered all over our wide country; while hundreds of thousands have flowed in from Ireland, from Germany, from Canada, to fill the places thus relinquished; and, since most of the immigrants, whether into or out of New England, seek their future homes in the spring-time of life, their children are mainly born to them after rather than before their migration. The Yankees have no fewer children than formerly; but they are now born in Minnesota, in Illinois, in Kansas; while those born in New England are, for identical reasons, in large proportion of Irish or of Canadian parentage. There are New England towns.h.i.+ps, whereof most of the heads of families are long past the prime of life; their children having left them for more attractive localities, and the work on their farms being now done mainly by foreign-born employes. As a general rule, the boys first wandered off; leaving the girls only the alternative of following, or dying in maidenhood. Marked diversities of race, of creed, and of education, have thus far prevented any considerable intermingling of the Yankee with the foreign element by marriage. And what is true of New England is measurably true of our own State.

I have not intended by these observations to combat the a.s.sumption that our people too generally prefer other employments to farming. The obstacles to effective modern Agriculture--that is, to agriculture prosecuted by the help of efficient machinery--presented by that incessant alternation of rock and bog, which characterizes New England and some parts of New York, I have already noted; and they interpose a serious, discouraging impediment to agricultural progress. A farm intersected by two or three swamps and brooks, separated by steep, rocky, ridges, and dotted over with pebbly knolls, sometimes giving place to a strip of sterile sand, is far more repulsive to the capable, intelligent farmer of to-day than it was to his grandfather. So far as my observation extends, there are more New England farms on which you cannot, than on which you can, find ten acres in one unbroken area suitable for planting to Corn, or sowing to Winter Grain. Hence, Agriculture in the East will always seem petty and irregular when brought into contrast with the prairie cultivation of the West. Grain can never be grown here so cheaply nor so abundantly as there; while the tendency of our pastures to cover themselves over with moss and worthless shrubs, unless frequently broken up and reseeded, makes even dairying more difficult and costly in New England and along its western border than in almost any other part of our country.

Yet, these discouragements are balanced by compensations. Timber springs luxuriantly and grows rapidly throughout this region; while our harsh, capricious climate gives to our Hickory, White Oak, White Ash, and other varieties, qualities unknown to such grown elsewhere, while prized everywhere. Apples, and most fruits of the Temperate Zone, do well with us; while our cities and manufacturing villages proffer most capacious markets. Potatoes and other edible roots produce liberally, and generally command good prices. Hay sells for $12 to $30 per ton, is easily grown, and is in eager and increasing demand. We ought to produce twice our present crop from the same area, and have need of every pound of it; for neither our cattle nor our sheep are nearly so numerous nor so well fed as they should be. In short, there is money to be made, by those who have means and know how, by buying New England farms, tilling them better, and growing much larger crops than their present occupants have done. There are many who can do better in the West; but the right men can still make money by farming this side of the Susquehanna and the Genesee; and I would gladly incite some thousands more of them to try.

XLIX.

LARGE AND SMALL FARMS.

There is fascination for most minds in naked magnitude. The young colonel, who can hardly handle a brigade effectively in battle, would like of all things to command a great army; and the tiller of fifty rugged acres has his ravis.h.i.+ng dreams of the delights inherent in a great Western farm, with its square miles of corn-fields, and its thousands of cattle. Each of them is partly right and partly wrong.

There are generals capable of commanding 100,000 men, Napoleon says there were two such in his day--himself and another: and these generally find the work they are fit for, without special effort or aspiration. So there are men, each of whom can really farm a towns.h.i.+p, not merely let a herd of cattle roam over it unfed and unsheltered, living and dying as may chance: the owners expecting to grow rich by their natural increase.

This _ranching_ is not properly farming at all, but a very different and far ruder art. I judge that the farmers who can really till--or even graze--several thousand acres of land, so as to realize a fair interest on its value, are even scarcer than the farms so capacious.

But there is such a thing as farming on a large scale; and it is a good business for those who understand it, and have all the means it requires. The farmer who annually grows a thousand acres of good Grain, and takes reasonable care of a thousand head of Cattle, is to be held in all honor. He will usually grow both his Grain and his Beef cheaper than a small farmer could do it, and will generally find a good balance on the right side when he makes up and squares his accounts of a year's operations. I could recommend no man to run into debt for a great farm, expecting that farm to work him out of it but he who inherited or has acquired a large farm, well stocked, and knows how to make it pay, may well cling to it, and count himself fortunate in its possession. But the great farmer is already regarded with sufficient envy. Most boys would gladly be such as he is; the difficulty in the case is that they lack the energy, persistency, resolution, and self-denial, requisite for its achievement.

We will leave large farms and farming to recommend themselves, while we consider more directly the opportunities and reasonable expectations of the small farmer.

The impression widely current that money cannot be made on a small farm--that, in farming, the great fish eat up the little ones--is deduced from very imperfect data. I have admitted that Grain and Beef can usually be produced at less cost on great than on small farms, though the rule is not without exceptions. I only insist that there are room and hope for the small farmer also, and that large farming can never absorb nor enable us to dispense with small farms.

I. And first with regard to Fruit. Some Tree-Fruits, as well as Grapes, are grown on a large scale in California--it is said, with profit. But nearly all our Pears, Apples, Cherries, Plums, etc., are grown by small farmers or gardeners, and are not likely to be grown otherwise. All of them need at particular seasons a personal attention and a vigilance which can seldom or never be accorded by the owners or renters of large farms. Should small farms be generally absorbed into larger, our Fruit-culture would thenceforth steadily decline.

II. The same is even more true of the production of Eggs and the rearing of Fowls. I have had knowledge of several attempts at producing Eggs and Fowls on a large scale in this country, but I have no trustworthy account of a single decided success in such an enterprise. On the contrary, many attempts to multiply Fowls by thousands have broken down, just when their success seemed secure. Some contagious disease, some unforeseen disaster, blasted the sanguine expectations of the experimenter, and trans.m.u.ted his gold into dross.

Yet, I judge that there is no industry more capable of indefinite extension, with fair returns, than Fowl-breeding on a moderate scale.

Eggs and Chickens are in universal demand. They are luxuries appreciated alike by rich and poor; and they might be doubled in quant.i.ty without materially depressing, the market. Our thronged and fas.h.i.+onable watering-places are never adequately supplied with them; our cities habitually take all they can get and look around for more. I believe that twice the largest number of Chickens ever yet produced in one year might be reared in 1871, with profit to the breeders. Even if others should fail, the home market found in each family would prove signally elastic.

This industry should especially commend itself to poor widows, struggling to retain and rear their children in frugal independence. A widow who, in the neighborhood of a city or of a manufacturing village, can rent a cottage with half an acre of southward-sloping, sunny land, which she may fence so tightly as to confine her Hens therein, whenever their roaming abroad would injure or annoy her neighbors, and who can incur the expense of constructing thereon a warm, commodious Hen-house, may almost certainly make the production of Eggs and Fowls a source of continuous profit. If she can obtain cheaply the refuse of a slaughter-house for feed, giving with it meal or grain in moderate quant.i.ties, and according that constant, personal, intelligent supervision, without which Fowl-breeding rarely prospers, she may reasonably expect it to pay, while affording her an occupation not subject to the caprices of an employer, and not requiring her to spend her days away from home.

III. Though the ordinary Market Vegetables may be grown on large farms, the fact that they seldom are is significant. Cabbages, Peas, Poled Beans, Tomatoes, and even Potatoes, are mainly grown on small farms, as they always have been. There are sections wherein no cash market for Vegetables exists or can be relied on; and here they will continue to be grown to the extent only of the growers' respective needs; but wherever the prevalence of manufactures or the neighborhood of a great city gives reasonable a.s.surance of a market, they are grown at a profit per acre which is rarely realized from a Grain-crop. No less than $100 per acre is often, if not generally, achieved by the growers of Cabbage around this city; and this not from rich, deep garden-mold, but from fair farming land, underdrained, subsoiled, and liberally manured.

The careless, slipshod farmer may do better--that is, he will not fail so signally--in Grain cultivation; but there are few more decided or brilliant successes than have been achieved within the last few years within sight of this City, and wholly in the tillage of small farms.

I trust I have here said enough to show that there is a legitimate and promising field for agricultural enterprise and effort, other than that which contemplates the acquisition and rule of a towns.h.i.+p, and that, while farming on a large area is to many attractive and inspiring, there are scope and incitement also for tillage on a humbler scale--for tillage that permits no weed to ripen seed, and no nest of caterpillars to flourish a month undisturbed--for tillage that achieves large crops and profits from small areas, and rejoices in that neatness and perfection of culture attainable only in the management of small farms.

L.

EXCHANGE AND DISTRIBUTION.

The machinery whereby the farmer of our day converts into cash or other values that portion of his products which is not consumed in his house or on his farm, seems to me lamentably imperfect. Let me ill.u.s.trate my meaning:

After three all but fruitless years, we have this year a bountiful Apple-crop, in this State and (I believe) throughout the North. Our old orchards being still, for the most part, preserved and in bearing condition, while a good many young ones, planted ten to twenty years ago, begin to fruit considerably, we had, throughout the three Fall months, a superabundance of this homely, wholesome, palatable fruit. It should have been cheap for the great body of our mechanics and laborers to provide their families with all the ripe, good Apples that they could consume without injuring themselves by gluttony. Good Apples should have been constantly displayed on every workingman's table, to be eaten raw as a dessert, or baked and eaten with bread and milk for breakfast or supper. Each provident housewife should now have her tub of applesauce, her barrel of dried apples, or both, for Winter use; while a dozen bushels of good keepers should be stored in every cellar, to be drawn upon from day to day during the next four or five months. In short, Apples should have been and be, from last August to next May, as common as bread and potatoes, and should have been and be as freely eaten in every household and by every fireside.

How nearly have we realized this?

I will not guess how many millions of bushels have rotted under the trees that bore them, been eaten by animals to little or no profit, or turned into cider that did not sell for so much as it cost, counting the Apples of no value. Living immediately on a railroad that rims into this City, wherefrom my place is 35 miles distant, I should be able to do better with Apples than most growers; and yet I judge that half my Apples were of no use to me. Many of them sold in this City for $1 per barrel, including the cask, which cost me 40 cents; and, when you have added the cost of transportation, you can guess that I had no surplus, after paying men $1.50 per day for picking and barreling them. I sold all I could to vinegar-makers at fifty cents per bushel for cider-apples--the casks being returned. But they could not take all I wished to sell them, there being so many sellers pressing to get rid of their windfalls before they rotted on their hands that even this market was glutted. That it was much worse for the farmer a dozen miles from a railroad and a hundred from the nearest city, none can doubt. I have heard that, in parts of Connecticut, cider was sold for fifty cents per barrel to whoever would furnish casks, and that their size was hardly considered. Manifestly, this left nothing for the apples.

If Apples could have been daily supplied to our poorer citizens in such quant.i.ties as they could conveniently take, at from fifty to seventy-five cents per bushel, according to quality and comeliness, I am confident that this City and its suburbs would have taken Two or Three Millions of bushels more than they have done; and the same is true of other cities. But the poor rarely buy a barrel of Apples at once; and they have been required to pay as much for half a peck as I could get for a bushel just like them. In other words: the hucksters and middlemen set so high a price on their respective services in dividing up a barrel of Apples and conveying them from the rural producer to the urban consumer that a large portion of the farmer's apples must rot on his hands or be sold by him for less than the cost of harvesting, while the poor of the cities find them too dear to be freely eaten.

Nor are Apples singular in this respect. I would like to grow a thousand bushels of English (round) and French or Swede Turnips per annum if I could be sure of getting $1 per barrel for them delivered at the railroad. If the poor of this City could buy such Turnips throughout their season by the half peck at the rate of $2 per barrel, I believe they would buy and eat many more than they do. But they are usually asked twenty-five cents per half peck, which is at the rate of $5 per barrel; and at this rate they hold them too dear for every-day use. So the Turnips are not grown, or the cattle are invited to clear them off before they rot and become worthless and nuisance.

Quite often, a green youth undertakes to get rich by farming near some great city. He has heard and believes that Cabbages bring from $5 to $8 and even $10 per hundred, Squashes from $10 to $25 per hundred, Watermelons from $20 to $50, and so on. He has made his calculations on this basis, and sanguinely expects to make money rapidly. But his products, in the first place, fall short of his estimates; they are not ready for market so soon as he expected they would be; and, when at length they are ready, every one else seems to have rushed in ahead of him. The market is glutted; no one seems to want his "truck" at any figure; he sells it for a song, and quits farming disgusted and bankrupt. May be, his stuff would have sold much better next week or the week after; but he could not afford to bring it to market and take it back day after day, on the chance that the demand for it would improve by-and-by. I judge that more young men have on this account turned their backs on farming, after a brief trial, than on any other.

They might have borne up against the shortness of their crops, hoping for better luck next time; but the necessity for selling them for a price that would not have reimbursed their cost, had they been ever so luxuriant, utterly disheartens and alienates them.