Model farm

“ Some eminent agriculturists insisted that the farm should be conducted purely as a business operation; others that it should be a ``model farm''—regardless of balance sheets; others still that it should be wholly experimental. ”

“ Your 'model farm,' as you term it, built by you to instruct, to encourage, and to reward deserving labourers, has been of incalculable service to this part of the country. Ordinary men think but of improving their cattle ”

“ Without dwelling too minutely upon every detail, we shall merely observe, that in all respects this farm passed most justly in the environs for a model farm, as much for the excellency of the method by which it was conducted, and the abundant crops it produced, as for the respectability and correct mode of life which distinguished the various labourers employed there, who were soon ranked among the most creditable and efficient workmen of the place. ”

“ Smith died, this fund had become $190,801.15, so rapidly does interest accumulate. This will be used to purchase two farms, one a Pattern Farm, to become a model to all farmers; the other an Experimental Farm, to aid the Pattern Farm in the art and science of husbandry and agriculture. Buildings are to be erected on the grounds suitable for mechanics, and workshops for the manufacture of implements of husbandry of the most approved models. If the income [Pg 154] will warrant it, tools for other trades may be manufactured. ”

“ So lives the man who is himself the industrious cultivator of his own soil.
And three times happy the proprietor of land where a battle with nature has been carried on for long years. The plowshare sinks deep into the well-cleaned ground, the ears hang heavy on the well-grown corn, and the turnip swells to colossal size. Then comes the time when a new form of industry is added to the old. Strange shapes of machinery are seen near the farm-buildings, giant caldrons, mighty wheels, and huge pipes, while the grinding and turning of the engines goes on ceaselessly by day and night. ”

“ Hence the most improved machinery is in use on the homesteads. Immediately upon the ripening of the grain, large binders are set to work, and are kept in operation from dawn to sunset. At times a score of these machines, each drawn by four horses, are to be seen moving in close succession around an immense field, with the result that, in a few days, the crop from hundreds of acres is safely stooked. In a few more days the standing grain is cured; then the farm is visited by one of the threshing outfits, which consist of powerful steam traction engines and separators. ”

“ In order to run the mechanism of the farms in the United States alone, it requires 20 million horses and mules. According to the United States Agricultural Department, a horse needs five acres yearly for keep, so that it necessitates 100 million acres to produce the motive power to run the farms. This is a larger area than is required for raising the country's crops of wheat, potatoes, rye and rice. On the other hand, the continuous rise in value of farm land does the rest to make a change for another source of motive power absolutely indispensable. ”

“ Change in attitude, technology or society occurs during all periods, but the 1920s and 1930s were a particularly dynamic time in the field of agriculture. Advances in the understanding of plant biology, animal husbandry and soil conservation, together with higher living standards through rural electrification and improved communications, were a cause for optimism about the future of the family farm. Yet these advances irrevocably altered the familiar rural life patterns. To maintain his own station within this changing world, the farmer's outlook and methods would also have to change. ”

“ Our arid lands will be made fertile by irrigation, but they will add only a small percentage to the amount already in quasi-cultivation. Our future food supplies must be drawn largely from the six million farms now under fences. These farms must be made to yield fourfold their present product, or they will fall short, not only of the demands made upon them, but also of their possibilities. That is why I preach the gospel of intensive farming, for grain, hay, market, and factory farm alike. ”

“ Again, a great amount of "locomotion" is spared by thorough cultivation. Take fifty bushes of wheat, ready for the harvest, standing upon a single acre, and it can be harvested in any of the known ways, with less than half the labor which would be required if it were spread over five acres. This would be true, if cut by the old hand sickle; true, to a greater extent if by the scythe and cradle; and to a still greater extend, if by the machines now in use. These machines are chiefly valuable, as a means of substituting animal power for the power of men in this branch of farm work. ”

“ On these farms every advantage of machinery, and every discovery in agricultural science, should be utilised [140] to the utmost. The crops should be carefully chosen with reference to soil and aspect—cereals, fruit, vegetables—and the culture adapted to the crop, the one aim being to obtain the largest amount of produce with the least expenditure of human labor. Whether land is most profitably cultivated in large or small parcels depends on the crop; and in the great area of the County Farm, la grande et la petite culture might each have its place. ”

“ In response to the demand for agricultural implements and machinery with which to cultivate five hundred million acres of newly utilized wild land, there have come into existence numerous great establishments for the making of machines that have been especially invented to meet the peculiarities and exigencies of Western farm life. ”

“ But for the most economic use of land in field crops and under more modern conditions it is necessary to have pretty level fields, of regular rectangular shape. The farm unit should be of such extent as to permit of the proper use of the soil by rotation of crops, and to employ fully the best modern labor-saving machinery for each purpose. ”

“ The size of the farm that is to support a family, and the kinds of crops that shall be grown and even the yields that shall be secured to the acre, are technical problems of agriculture. In this New World, with expensive labor and still with cheap land, we cannot yet afford to produce the high yields of some of the Old World places,—it may be better to till more land with less yield to the acre. ”

“ What is needed in agriculture to charm the population back to the fields, and to double the production of the soil, is to substitute suitable buildings at the centre of an agricultural township for unsuitable, straggling farm-houses and barns, and to replace solitary labor on farms by the modern method of organized industry, applied to the cultivation of a domain large enough to permit selection of soils and the use of adequate machinery. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rather I would ask, Are such sights and thrills worth the deliberate purpose to have a woodlot, as well as a beanpatch and a henyard, on the farm?
Our American farm life needs new and better machinery, better methods, better buildings, better roads, better schools, better stock; but given all of these, and farm life must still continue to be earthy, material, mere beans—only more of them—until the farm is run on shares with all the universe around, until the farmer learns not only to reap the sunshine, but also to harvest the snow ”

“ Every farmer needs a workshop, and if he has none, should provide himself with one. It need not be large, and can be made quite inexpensively. In his barn, if it is large, partition off a room for a workshop 12 × 14 feet, and if he not be blessed with a good large barn, why a thousand feet of common boards, and a load of good stout saplings, with a little mechanical skill and some muscle, will provide a very good farm workshop. ”

“ In no case do we buy anything from the settlers, and in no case do we sell anything to them, except the original equipment which goes with the original purchase.
The statement that the company's purpose is to reserve large demonstration farms is laughable, for we only have two demonstration farms reserved in our entire tract of 60,000 acres. Those two demonstration farms cover 2,500 acres. Already one demonstration farm in a colony where we sold practically all the land has been cut up into small farms and offered for general sale. ”

“ Farmers are cultivating their broad acres, woodsmen are chopping and hewing in the forest, miners are drilling in underground chambers, and the products of farm, forest, and mine are finding their way by river, road, and rail to the great distributing centres. In the town the machinery of mill and factory keeps busy thousands of operatives, and turns out manufactured products to compete with the products of the soil for right of way to the cities of the New World and the Old. ”

“ But with the wife of the farmer, the woman's laboratory-machine-shop-studio is not a little room by itself. The home is a business center; it is a dynamo from which goes out the power for the whole machinery; it is itself a piece of elaborate machinery without which the rest of the cogs and bands and phlanges would all go awry and break into pieces, doing damage to the whole farm-factory. ”

“ The process of attraction will not end even there; the development of more and more scientific engineering and of really adaptable operatives will render possible agricultural contrivances that are now only dreams, and the diffusion of this new class over the country-side—assuming the reasoning in my second chapter to be sound—will bring the lever of the improved schools under the agriculturist. The practically autonomous farm of the old epoch will probably be replaced by a great variety of types of cultivation, each with its labour-saving equipment. ”

“ These and many other achievements substantially changed the farm enterprise in two major directions: first, advances in technology allowed farmers to do more in less time; second, discoveries in science allowed farmers to increase the yield from the land. Farmers got more from each acre, plant, and animal.
Farmers could use the savings in time brought by better implements and new machines to increase the amount of land farmed and the number of animals cared for. Presumably, the farmer could also use the saved time for greater leisure. ”

“ The occupants of these fiefs or farms, under the burdens now specified, are virtual proprietors of the soil, which they cultivate with their own hands, aided by their families. They are described as a particularly contented, industrious, and amiable race of people; and the lots, though much subdivided in the course of succession, are still sufficient to maintain them in simple plenty. They till their land with diligence, though without skill, having scarcely adopted any of the modern improvements. Their study is to produce from the farm every thing they need ”

“ On the north side of the line, opposite the ice-house, the dairy-house; then a square with a small power-house for its centre, a woodhouse, a horse barn for the farm horses, a granary and a forage barn for its four corners. Beyond this square to the west was the fruit-house and the tool-house—the latter large enough to house all the farm machinery we should ever need. I have a horror of the economy that leaves good tools to sky and clouds without protection. ”

“ Yet their machinery costs nearly twice as much per acre as that on the larger farms that have nearly three times as much machinery. Machinery can be used more effectively on large farms. One mower, one hay rake, one tedder, one hay loader, one corn harvester, one grain harvester, one grain drill, one manure spreader, one potato digger, one potato planter, can do their work on a 250 acre farm as readily as on a small farm. Few of the small farms have half of these tools. If a small farm does have nearly all the list, it cannot use them enough to pay for the investment. ”

“ Naturally, the questions arise, are these large structures necessary, and what changes in agriculture have taken place to create a need for such mammoth structures? They are necessarily expensive, and too often dwarf and belittle the house when placed near it.
Modern advanced farmers secure nearly or quite double the average yield of crops of their grandfathers. This is an indisputable fact, notwithstanding the hue and cry about the decadence of the rural population. The facts are that some are farming much better than the older generations and some much worse. ”

“ The Canadian Pacific Railway, the Grand Trunk Pacific, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and a number of land companies offer ready-made farms of various sizes under the most attractive conditions. The land has been broken, a house has been built upon it. It has been fenced and irrigated, if irrigation is necessary. The man can step on to the farm, occupy the house and immediately commence operations, making the profit of the harvest the very first year. Suppose a man with a bit of money wants to buy a farm ready for cultivation. ”

“ An effective machine of this kind is of incalculable value to the farmer in removing at once from his fields the unsightly stumps that disfigure them, and which adds so much to the labor of cultivating those fields. ”

“ The farm then becomes like a great factory or mercantile house. There must be at the head of everything a large organizing brain capable of introducing and enforcing thorough system, and of skilfully directing labor and investment, so as to secure the most from the least outlay. A farm such as we have just seen would be like a bottomless pit for money in bungling, careless hands. ”