Whenever our anti-book-farmers can show us better crops at a less
expense, better flocks, and better farms, and better owners on them,
than book-farmers can, we shall become converts to their doctrines.
But, as yet, we cannot see how _intelligence_ in a farmer, should
injure his crops. Nor what difference it makes whether a farmer gets
his ideas from a sheet of paper, or from a neighbor’s mouth, or from
his own experience, so that he only gets good, practical, sound ideas.
A farmer never objects to receive _political_ information from
newspapers; he is quite willing to learn the state of markets from
newspapers, and as willing to gain religious notions from reading, and
historical knowledge, and all sorts of information except that which
relates to his business. He will go over and hear a neighbor tell how
he prepares his wheat-lands, how he selects and puts in his seed, how
he deals with his grounds in spring, in harvest and after
harvest-time; but if that neighbor should write it all down carefully
and put it into paper, it’s all poison! it’s _book-farming_!
“Strange such a difference there should be
’Twixt tweedledum, and tweedledee.”
If I raise a head of lettuce surpassing all that has been seen
hereabouts, every good farmer that loves a salad would send for a
little seed, and ask, as he took it, “How do you contrive to raise
such monstrous heads? you must have some secret about it.” But if my
way were written down and printed, he would not touch it. “Poh, it’s
bookish!”
Now let us inquire in what States land is the best managed, yields the
most with the least cost, where are the best sheep, the best cattle,
the best hogs, the best wheat? It will be found to be in those
States having the most agricultural societies and the most
widely-disseminated agricultural papers.
What is there in agriculture that requires a man to be ignorant if he
will be skillful? Or why may every other class of men learn by reading
except the farmer? Mechanics have their journals; commercial men have
their papers; religious men, theirs; politicians, theirs; there are
magazines and journals for the arts, for science, for education, and
_why not for that grand pursuit on which all these stand_? We really
could never understand why farmers should not wish to have their
vocation on a level with others; why they should feel proud to have
_no_ paper, while every other pursuit is fond of _having_ one.
Those who are prejudiced against book-farming are either good farmers,
misinformed of the design of agricultural papers, or poor farmers who
only treat this subject as they do all others, with blundering
ignorance. First, the good farmers; there are in every county many
industrious, hard-working men, who know that they cannot afford to
risk anything upon wild experiments. They have a growing family to
support, taxes to pay, lands perhaps on which purchase money is due,
or they are straining every nerve to make their crops build a barn,
that the barn may hold their crops. They suppose an agricultural paper
to be stuffed full of wild fancies, expensive experiments, big stories
made up by men who know of no farming except parlor-farming. They
would, doubtless, be surprised to learn that ninety-nine parts in a
hundred of the contents of agricultural papers are written by
_hard-working practical farmers_! that the editor’s business is not to
foist absurd stories upon credulous readers, but to sift stories, to
scrutinize accounts, to obtain whatever has been abundantly proved to
be fact, and to reject all that is suspected to be mere fanciful
theory. Such papers are designed to prevent imposition; to kill off
pretenders by exposing them; to search out from practical men whatever
they have found out, and to publish it for the benefit of their
brethren all over the Union; to spread before the laboring classes
such sound, well-approved scientific knowledge as shall throw light
upon every operation of the farm, the orchard and the garden.
The other class who rail at book-farming ought to be excused, for they
do not treat book-farming any worse than they do their own farming;
indeed, not half so bad. They rate the paper with their tongue; but
cruelly abuse their ground, for twelve months in the year with both
hands. I will draw the portrait of a genuine anti-book-farmer of this
last sort.
He plows three inches deep lest he should turn up the poison that, in
his estimation, lies below; his wheat-land is plowed so as to keep as
much water on it as possible; he sows two bushels to the acre and
reaps ten, so that it takes a fifth of his crop to seed his ground;
his corn-land has never any help from him, but bears just what it
pleases, which is from thirty to thirty-five bushels by measurement,
though he brags that it is fifty or sixty. His hogs, if not remarkable
for fattening qualities, would beat old Eclipse at a quarter-race; and
were the man not prejudiced against deep plowing, his hogs would work
his grounds better with their prodigious snouts than he does with his
jack-knife-plow. His meadow-lands yield him from three-quarters of a
ton to a whole ton of hay, which is regularly spoiled in curing,
regularly left out for a month, very irregularly stacked up, and left
for the cattle to pull out at their pleasure, and half-eat and
half-trample underfoot. His horses would excite the avarice of an
anatomist in search of osteological specimens, and returning from
their range of pasture they are walking herbariums, bearing specimens
in their mane and tail of every weed that bears a bur or cockle. But
oh, the cows! If held up in a bright day to the sun, don’t you think
they would be semi-transparent? But he tells us that good milkers are
always poor! His cows get what Providence sends them, and very little
beside, except in winter, then they have a half-peck of corn on ears a
foot long thrown to them, and they afford lively spectacles of
animated corn and cob-crushers—never mind, they yield, on an average,
three quarts of milk a-day! and that milk yields varieties of butter
quite astonishing.
His farm never grows any better, in many respects it gets annually
worse. After ten years’ work on a good soil, while his neighbors have
grown rich, he is just where he started, only his house is dirtier,
his fences more tottering, his soil poorer, his pride and his
ignorance greater. And when, at last, he sells out to a Pennsylvanian
that reads the Farmers’ Cabinet, or to some New Yorker with his
Cultivator packed up carefully as if it were gold, or to a Yankee with
his New England Farmer, he goes off to Missouri, thanking Heaven that
_he’s_ not a book-farmer!
Unquestionably, there are two sides to this question, and both of them
_extremes_, and therefore both of them deficient in science and in
common sense. If men were made according to our notions, there should
not be a silly one alive; but it is otherwise ordered, and there is no
department of human life in which we do not find weak and foolish men.
This is true of farming as much as of any other calling. But no one
dreams of setting down the vocation of agriculture because, like every
other, it has its proportion of stupid men.
Why then should agricultural _writers_, as a class, be summarily
rejected because some of them are visionary? Are we not to be allowed
our share of fools as well as every other department of life? We
insist on our rights.
A book or a paper never proposes to take the place of a farmer’s
_judgment_. Not to read at all is bad enough; but to read, and swallow
everything without reflection, or discrimination, this is even worse.
Such a one is not a book-headed but a block-headed farmer. Papers are
designed to _assist_. Those who read them must select, modify, and act
according to their own native judgment. So used, papers answer a
double purpose; they convey a great amount of valuable practical
information, and then they stir up the reader to habits of thought;
they make him more inquisitive, more observing, more reasoning, and,
therefore, more reasonable.
Now, as to the contents of agricultural papers, whose fault is it if
they are not _practical_? Who are the practical men? who are daily
conversant with just the things a cultivator most needs to know? who
is stumbling upon difficulties, or discovering some escape from them?
who is it that knows so much about gardens, orchards, farms, cattle,
grains and grasses? Why, the very men _who won’t write a word for the
paper that they read_, and then complain that there is nothing
_practical in it_. Yes there is. There is practical evidence that men
are more willing to be helped than to help others; and also that men
sometimes blame others for things of which they themselves are chiefly
blameworthy.