Horace Greeley

“ No good can result from such insincere and extravagant praises of a calling which so few freely choose, and so many gladly shun. Grant that the farmer's ought to be the most enviable and envied vocation, we know that in fact it is not and, agreeing that it should be, the business in hand is to make it so. There must be obstacles to surmount, mistakes to set right, impediments to overcome, before farming can be in all respects the idolized pursuit which poets are so ready to proclaim it and orators so delight to represent it. ”

“ Meantime, let us make the most of what we have, by diffusing, studying, discussing, criticizing, Liebig's Agricultural Chemistry, Dana's Muck Manual, Waring's Elements, and the books that each treat more especially of some department of the farmer's art, and so making ourselves familiar, first, with the principles, then with the methods, of scientific, efficient, successful husbandry. Let us, who love it, treat Agriculture as the elevated, ennobling pursuit it might and should be, and thus exalt it in the estimation of the entire community. ”

“ In my own hilly, rocky, often boggy, Westchester—probably within six of being the oldest Agricultural County in the Union—I am confident that ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to forest with profit to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. It is a fruit-growing, milk-producing, truck-farming county, closely adjoining the greatest city of the New World; hence, one wherein land can be cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else—yet I am satisfied that half its surface may be more advantageously devoted to timber than to grass or tillage. ”

“ The subjugation and tillage of a farm, like the running of a factory or furnace, involves a continual use of Power; but the manufacturer obtains his from sources which supply it cheaply and in great abundance, while the farmer has been content with an inferior article, in limited supply, at a far heavier cost. Yet the stream which turns the factory's wheels and sets all its machinery in motion traverses or skirts many farms as well, and, if properly harnessed, is just as ready to speed the plow as to impel the shuttles of a woolen-mill, or revolve the cylinders of a calico-printery. ”

“ Necessity is the master of us all. A farmer may be as strenuous for deep plowing as I am—may firmly believe that the soil should be thoroughly broken up and pulverized to a depth of fifteen to thirty inches, according to the crop; but, if all the team he can muster is a yoke of thin, light steers, or a span of old, spavined horses, which have not even a speaking acquaintance with grain, what shall he do? So he may heartily wish he had a thousand loads of barn-yard manure, and know how to make a good use of every ounce of it ”

“ Immigration will yet thickly dot the great Sahara with oases of verdure and plenty; but it will, long ere that, have covered the valleys of our Great Basin and those which skirt the affluents of the savage and desolate Colorado with a beauty and thrift surpassing the dreams of poets. And yet, its easiest and readiest triumphs are to be won right here—in the valleys of the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Susquehanna, and the Potomac. ”

“ What use or sense can there be in a lawyer, doctor, broker, or editor, talking to a crowd of farmers as if they were the most favored of mortals and their life the noblest and happiest known to mankind? Whatever it might be, and may yet become, we all know that the average farmer's life is not what it is thus represented: for, if it were, thousands would be rushing into it where barely hundreds left it: whereas we all see that the fact is quite otherwise. ”

“ What our farmers need is not a steam-plow as a specialty, but a locomotive that can travel with facility, not only on common wagon-roads, but across even freshly-plowed fields, without embarrassment, and prove as docile to its manager's touch as an average span of horses. Such a locomotive should not cost more then $500, nor weigh more than a tun when laden with fuel and water for a half-hour's steady work. ”

“ I have no such knowledge of Chemistry and Geology as any man needs to make him a thoroughly good farmer. I am quite aware that men have raised good crops—a good many of them—who knew nothing of science, and did not consider any acquaintance with it conducive to efficiency or success in their vocation. I have no doubt that men will continue to grow such crops, and to make money by agriculture, who hardly know what is meant by Chemistry or Geology ”

“ One achievement only of our age and country—the banishment of human chattelhood from our soil—seems now to have been worth all the requisite efforts, the agony and bloody sweat, through which it was accomplished. But another reform, not so palpably demanded by justice and humanity, yet equally conducive to the well-being of our race, presses hard on its heels, and insists that we shall accord it instant and earnest consideration. ”

“ In my deliberate judgment, a farm of one hundred acres will yield more feed, with far greater uniformity of product from year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests, ravine-sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with timber, than if it be swept clean of trees and all devoted to grass. Hence, I insist that the farmer who sweeps off his wood and resolves to depend on coal for fuel, hoping to increase permanently the product of his dairy, makes a sad miscalculation. ”

“ I do not know just where and when all pasturing becomes wasteful and improvident; but I do know that pasturing fosters thistles, briers, and every noxious weed, and so is inconsistent with cleanly and thorough tillage. I know that the same acres will feed far more stock, and keep them in better condition, if their food be cut and fed to them, than if they are sent out to gather it for themselves. I know that the cost of cutting their grass and other fodder with modern machinery need not greatly exceed that of driving them to remote pastures in the morning and hunting them up at nightfall. ”

“ Finally, and as the sum of my convictions, we need more thought, more study, more intellect, infused into our Agriculture, with less blind devotion to a routine which, if ever judicious, has long since ceased to be so. The tillage which a pioneer, fighting single-handed and all but empty-handed with a dense forest of giant trees, which he can do no better than to cut down and burn, found indispensable among their stumps and roots, is not adapted to the altered circumstances of his grandchildren. ”

“ I know, moreover, that what passes for farming among us is not so noble, so intellectual, so attractive, a pursuit as it might and should be—that most farmers might farm better and live to better purpose than they do. Of all the false teaching, I most condemn that which flatters farmers as though they were demigods and their calling the grandest and the happiest ever followed by mortals, when the hearer, unless very green, must feel that the speaker doesn't believe one word of all be utters ”

“ I do not even join in the cant, which speaks of farmers as supporting everybody else—of farming as the only indispensable vocation. You may say if you will that mankind could not subsist if there were no tillers of the soil; but the same is true of house-builders, and of some other classes. A thoroughly good farmer is a useful, valuable citizen: so is a good merchant, doctor, or lawyer. It is not essential to the true nobility and genuine worth of the farmer's calling that any other should be assailed or disparaged. ”

“ Water is supplied from the sky, or from springs and streams; and little more than the most ordinary capacity for observation is required to determine when it is present in sufficient quantity, when in baleful excess. But who, unaided by Science, can decide whether the soil does or does not contain the elements requisite for the luxuriant growth and perfect development of Wheat, or Fruit, or Grass, or Beets, or Apples? Who knows, save as he blindly infers from results, what mineral ingredients of this or that crop are deficient in given field, and what are present in excess? ”

“ Pastures overgrown with bushes and chequered by quaking, miry bogs; meadows foul with every weed, from white daisy up to the rankest brakes, with hill-sides that may once have been productive, but from which crop after crop has been taken and nothing returned to them, until their yield has shrunk to half or three-fourths of a tun of poor hay, these are the average indications of a farm nearly run out by the poorest sort of farming. Such farms were common in the New England of my boyhood; I trust they are less so to-day ”

“ Now, the young man who has bought or inherited this farm may be wholly and consciously unable to enter upon any expensive system of improvement for the next ten years—may fully realize that four or five days of each week must meantime be given to the growing or earning of present bread—yet he should none the less study well the capacities and adaptations of each acre, and mature a comprehensive plan for the ultimate bringing of each field into the best and most useful condition whereof it is susceptible, before he cuts a living tree or digs a solitary drain. ”

“ The birds that would help us to make head against our insect foes are slaughtered by reckless boys—many of them big enough to know better—and our perils and losses from enemies who would be contemptible if their numbers did not render them formidable increase from year to year. We must change all this; and the first requisite of our situation is a firm alliance of the entire farming and fruit-growing interest defensive as to birds, offensive toward their destroyers, and toward the vermin multiplied and shielded by the ruthless massacre of our feathered friends. ”

“ Descended from several generations of timber-cutters (for my paternal ancestors came to America in 1640) , and myself engaged for three years in land-clearing, I realize that trees exist for use rather than for ornament, and have no more scruple as to cutting timber in a forest than as to cutting grass in a meadow. Utility is the reason and end of all vegetable growth—of a hickory's no less than a corn-stalk's. ”

“ If I were to estimate the average absolute loss of the farmers of this country from Insects at $100,000,000 per annum, I should doubtless be far below the mark. The loss of fruit alone by the devastations of insects, within a radius of fifty miles from this City, must amount in value to Millions. In my neighborhood, the Peach once flourished, but flourishes no more, and Cherries have been all but annihilated. Apples were till lately our most profitable and perhaps our most important product; but the worms take half our average crop and sadly damage what they do not utterly destroy. ”

“ Whether wholly because their roots permeate and break up the soil during their life and enrich it in their decay, or for diverse reasons, it is certainly true that land—and especially poor land—is enriched by growing upon it a crop of almost any timber, the evergreens possibly excepted. So, should you ever have land that you cannot till to profit, whether because it is too poor, or because you have a sufficiency that is better, you should at once devote it to wood. ”

“ The very farmer who tells you that he never opened a book which treats of Agriculture, and never wants to see one, will ask his neighbor how to grow or cure tobacco, or hops, or sorgho, or any crop with which he is yet unacquainted, when the chances are a hundred to one that this particular neighbor cannot advise him so well as the volume which embodies the experience of a thousand cultivators of this very plant instead of barely one. ”

“ Quite commonly, a farmer visits a grand nursery, sees with admiration its trees and vines loaded with the most luscious Fruits, and rashly infers that he has only to buy a good stock of like Trees and Vines to insure himself an abundance of delicious fruit. So he buys and sets; but with no such preparation of the soil, and no such care to keep it mellow and free from weeds, or to baffle and destroy predatory insects, as the nurseryman employs. ”

“ But this man would rise at four o'clock of a winter morning, harness his span of horses and hitch them to his large market-wagon (loaded over night) , drive ten miles into Boston, unload and load back again, be home at fair breakfast-time, and, hastily swallowing his meal, be fresh as a daisy for his day's work, in which he would lead his hired men, keeping them clear of the least danger of falling asleep. Such men are rare, but they still exist, proving scarcely anything impossible to an indomitable will. ”

“ In my boyhood, I hoed Corn diligently for weeks at a time, drawing the earth from between the rows up about the stalks to a depth of three or four inches; thus forming hills which the West has since taught me to be of no use, but rather a detriment, embarrassing the efforts of the growing, hungry plants to throw out their roots extensively in every direction, and subjecting them to needless injury from drouth. ”

“ I have said that I consider the soil of New England as cheap, all things considered, for him who is able to buy and work it, as that of Minnesota or Arkansas—that I urge migration to the West only upon those who cannot pay for farms in the old States. I doubt whether the farmers of any other section have, in the average, done better, throughout the last ten years, than the butter-makers of Vermont, the cheese-dairymen of this State. ”

“ 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. ”