Edmund Morris

“ He is too often regarded as a foolish man, because he spends his money freely, even though it be scattered among the sneering crowd. However thoroughly he pulls down, however judiciously he builds up and improves, the masses neither appreciate nor comprehend. They see him exterminate the most impenetrable hedgerows with no other remark than as to what the job will cost. He drains the immemorial marsh, abolishes the spatter-docks, squelches the frogs, digs up the dead apple-trees, and brings in a huge stand of clover. The latter they can comprehend, because they know what clover is. ”

“ As good roads invite settlement, so population, the great promoter of the value of land, has come in rapidly, and changed the aspect of every farm-house. Good fences line the roadside, rank hedge-rows have disappeared, new farm-houses have been everywhere built, low lands have been drained, manures have been imported from the cities, wheat is now the staple winter-grain, rye has ceased to be cultivated, and rye bread is now a mere reminiscence of the old dispensation. ”

“ I was one day standing near an old homestead, which was thus crumbling into a heap of firewood, by order of a wealthy citizen who had recently become the purchaser. A group of idle neighbors were leaning, like myself, against the old rickety fence, watching the progress of demolition, when an ancient farmer, who knew nothing beyond six per cent., broke the silence by observing—
“So it is. When a city man buys a farm and pays for it, then he begins to spend money.” ”

“ How different the path I travelled from that in which ambition hurries forward—too narrow for friendship, too crooked for love, too rugged for honesty, and too dark for science! Thus, if we choose, we may sandwich in the poetry with the prose of life. Thus, many a dainty happiness and relishing enjoyment may come between the slices of every-day work, if we only so determine. ”

“ There was almost every variety of these pests. It seemed as if the whole township had concentrated its wealth of weeds upon my premises. In the quick, warm soil of New Jersey, they appear to have found a most congenial home, as they abound on every farm that I have seen. Cultivators appear to have abandoned all hope of eradicating them. Knowing that the last year’s crop had gone to seed, I confess to looking for something of the kind, but I was wholly unprepared for the thick haze which everywhere covered the ground. ”

“ Yet these men are sometimes pitied because their labors afford them no profit, as if the whole duty of man lay in the acquisition of six per cent. It is not important that their labor should result in profit; and if of no consequence to themselves, why should their failure to realize it be so distressing to others? It would cost them quite as much to live if they had remained in the city. The only real money difference is, that what they spend is disbursed in one place instead of another. There is the vast collateral gratification of living where the most comfort is to be obtained. ”

“ But in the apparently humbler trade of trucking and fruit-growing every thing is cash. Manure, the great staple article to be bought, can be had on credit; but all you grow from it is cash. Food must be paid for on delivery, and he who produces it will have no bad debts at the year’s end but such as may exist from his own carelessness or neglect. Thus, what a farmer earns he gets. He loses none of his gains, if he attends to his business. ”

“ Why leave the privileges of a long-established civilization,—the schools, the churches of home,—the daily intercourse of acquaintances and friends,—merely because land producing twenty bushels of wheat per acre can be purchased for a dollar, when that producing twenty times as much in fruit or vegetables can be had for fifty, and often even for less? ”

“ Having been used on the raspberries for several years, I can testify to the extraordinary value of this mode of applying manure. It stimulates an astonishing growth of canes, increases the quantity of fruit, while it secures the grand desideratum, a prodigious enlargement in the size of the berries. I find by inquiry among my neighbors that none of them get so high prices as myself. Every crop has been growing more profitable than the preceding one; and it may be set down that an acre of raspberries, treated and attended to as they ought to be, will realize a net profit of $200 annually. ”

“ One case is too striking to be omitted. A German, with his wife, and two children just large enough to pull weeds and drive a cow, had settled, seven years before, on eight acres, from which the owner had been driven by running deeply in debt at the grog-shop. The drunkard’s acres had of course become starved and desolate; the fences were half down, there was no garden, and the hovel, in which his unhappy family was once snugly housed, appeared ready to take its departure on the wings of the wind. Every fruit-tree had died. ”

“ She frowned upon the senseless rivalries of social life, as destructive of morals, mind, and health, and imbued their spirits with a devout veneration for holy things. She taught them no worship of the almighty dollar, but sound, practical economy, the art of saving the pieces. ”

“ I will not say that ten acres in New Jersey can be made to produce more money than ten acres located elsewhere, within reach of the great city markets. Without doubt, the productiveness of either tract will be in exact proportion to the care and skill of cultivation, and the thoroughness of manuring. In either case, it is utter folly for a man to attempt the cultivation of more land than he can manage thoroughly. The chances are then invariably against him. I consider the real office of the ground to be merely that of holding a plant in an erect position, while you feed the roots. ”

“ This preference for investment in real estate will doubtless be objected to by the young and dashing business man. But lands, or a fund secured by real estate, is unquestionably not only the highest security, but in the hands of heirs it is the only one likely to survive a single generation. Hence the wisdom of the common law, which neither permits the guardian to sell the lands of his ward, nor even the court, in its discretion, to grant authority for their sale, except upon sufficient grounds shown,—as a necessity for raising a fund for the support and education of the ward. ”

“ But put the value of the house into a farm, or even the half of it—the farm would have a dwelling-house upon it, in which my family would find as good a shelter, while the land, if cultivated as industriously as I had always cultivated business, would belie the flood of evidence I had been studying for many years, if it failed to yield to my efforts the returns which it was manifestly returning to others. We could live contentedly on a thousand dollars a year, and here we should have no landlord to pay. ”

“ More than once he has been cheated by the purchase of novelties of this kind, besides losing time and money in cultivating them long enough to prove the cheat; but these losses have been but as dust in the great balance of his profit.
As may be supposed, such a man could not fail to become rich. From his humble beginning of a single acre he has gone on adding farm to farm, house to house, and lot to lot, and is ever on hand to purchase more. His passion is to own land. But even so thorough a farmer as he may in the end acquire too much to be profitable. ”

“ I pity the man who can look on these things, who can listen to the song of wrens, the loud, inspiring carol of the robin on the tree-top, as the setting sun gilds its utmost extremities, listening to these vocal evidences of animal comfort and enjoyment, without feeling any augmentation of his own pleasures, and that the lonesome blank which sometimes hangs around a rural residence is thus gratefully filled. ”

“ Such skinning and exhausting tillage is one cause of the annual relative decline of the wheat-crop all over the Union, and of the frequent changes in the ownership of lands. The fragrance of a fat and ample manure heap is as grateful to the nostrils of a good farmer, as the fumes of the tavern are notoriously attractive to those of a poor one. ”

“ The nursery business has grown to a magnitude truly gigantic, because the market for fruit has been annually growing larger, and no business enlarges itself unless it is proved to be profitable.
The market cannot be glutted with good fruit. The multiplication of mouths to consume it is far more rapid than the increase of any supply that growers can effect. Within ten years the masses have had a slight taste of choice fruits, and but little more. Indulgence has only served to whet their appetites. The more of them there is offered in the market, the more will there be consumed. ”

“ It was also of easy access from the city for manure-boats. Every town within the range of my wants was well supplied with churches, schools, and stores, together with an intelligent and moral population. I should be surrounded by desirable neighbors, while an hour’s ride by steamboat or railroad would place me, many times daily, among all my ancient friends in the city. We should by no means become hermits. I knew the country so well from my numerous visits among the fruit-growers, when in search of information, as to anticipate but little difficulty in finding the proper location. ”

“ But choose as he may, locate as he will, he must not, as he hopes to succeed in growing the smaller fruits to profit, locate himself out of reach of a daily cash market. New York and Philadelphia may be likened to two huge bags of gold, always filled, and ever standing open for him to thrust in his hand, provided in the other he brings something to eat. From this exhaustless fountain of wealth, whole adjacent populations have become rich. ”

“ All judged the soil as worthless as the deep sand in the highway. Where some settler did clear up a farm, his labors presented no inviting spectacle to the passing traveller. If manure was known in those days, the farmer did not appear to value it, for he neither manufactured nor used it. ”

“ Take these two last ingredients, substitute industry and economy for the purse, and then unite all in the person of a persevering man, penniless though he be, and a home may be established, less pretentious, it is true, but within which Love will gladly seek to fold his wings, evermore to nestle round the heart, while Time, sure in his approaches, but lavish of his compensations, will lift up the modest occupants into the sunshine of a grateful independence. ”

“ Insects are, occasionally, one of the farmer’s greatest pests. But high, thorough farming is a potent destroyer. It is claimed by British writers to be a sure one. When the average produce of wheat in England was only twenty bushels per acre, the ravages of the insect tribe were far more general and destructive than they have been since the average has risen to forty bushels per acre. Why may not the cultivation of domestic birds like these, that nestle round the house and garden, where insects mostly congregate, be considered an important feature in any system of thorough farming? ”

“ But as Dick’s devotion to the currycomb excited my admiration, so there was abundant evidence that both pigs and cow were equally captivated.
This business of raising and carefully attending to only half a dozen hogs, is worthy of every small farmer’s serious study and attention. The hog and his food, with what is cheapest and best for him, is really one of the sciences, not an exact one, it is true, but still a science. One must look at and study many things, and they can all be made to pay. The propensity to acquire fat in many animals seems to have been implanted by nature. ”

“ I will not go so far as to say, with a living poet, that
“The world knows nothing of its greatest men;”
but there are forms of greatness, or at least excellence, that die and make no sign; there are martyrs who miss the palm, but not the stake; there are heroes without the laurel, and conquerors without the triumph. ”

“ If our choicest fruits are near at hand, he takes a small toll of them, but a small one only. In reality, a very considerable part of every crop of grain and fruit is planted, not for the mouths of our children, but for the fly, the curculio, and the canker-worm, or some other of these pests of husbandry. Science has done something, and will no doubt do more, to alleviate the plague. It has already taught us not to wage equal war on the wheat-fly and the parasite which preys upon it ”

“ The soil of Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, was too heavy for some of the lighter fruits. New Jersey, with its admirable sandy loam light, warm, and of surprisingly easy tillage, was proverbially adapted for the growth of all market produce, whether fruit or vegetable, and was at the same time a week or two earlier. Land was far cheaper, there was no State debt, taxes were merely nominal, and an acre that could be bought for thirty dollars could be made four times as productive as an acre of the best wheat land in Pennsylvania. ”

“ I knew it would cost time and trouble; but I have long since discovered that most things of value in this world come to us only as the result of diligent, unremitted labor. The man, even upon ten acres, who is content to see around him only barren fields, scanty crops, and lean, starving animals, does not deserve the name of farmer. Unless he can devise ways and means for changing such a condition of things, and cease ridiculing all propositions of amendment that may be pointed out to him, he had better be up and off, and give place to a live man. ”

“ I have known another to sell $500 worth of tomatoes from a single acre, besides having many bushels for the hog-pen. I could name owners of very small tracts who are doing well in the same business. Asparagus, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants, grapes, and gooseberries, grow to perfection, and yield enormous returns when properly attended to, far surpassing any thing ever obtained from the heavier staple crops, such as grain, grass and stock.
But it is to be noticed that the greatest profit per acre is almost invariably realized by those who have very small farms. ”

“ It is very frequently the same throughout the West, where so much that is raised upon a farm is valueless; and where, for even the grains, they have a market which barely pays the expense of living. The expense incurred in farming can be regulated by the profit of the crops; and where even no manure is required, the labor has to be expended, and crops in distant localities often fail to pay the expense of this labor. Where land will pay for a liberal cultivation, as well as fertilizing, it is much better, as a farmer must work his stock, and a certain amount of care is indispensable. ”