A Farmer on His Own Business

I AM not planning to write a history of agriculture or a dissertation on farm conditions, but rather to set down some of the thoughts that have drifted across my farm horizon, and to record some of my questions concerning the business by which I live. Possibly I have a certain vantage-ground in my point of view, because we have been farm-folk for a long, long time, and since 1800 our hopes and ambitions and labors have been centred around one old farm snuggled away among the glaciated limestone drumlins up in the hill country of eastern New York.

My father, when he left us, was a patient, wise old man, who possessed much inherited farm wisdom, and who added to it much of experience during more than eighty years. His life covered an agricultural span that linked the pioneer farmer with the present. In his boyhood he lived close to what Horace Bushnell lingeringly and lovingly called ‘The Golden Age of Homespun,’ and he remained to see the tractor on the fields that the slow ox-team once tilled, and electricity applied to the everyday purposes of the farm. Through many years he told me of much that he had seen and remembered, and he handed down to me many things that he had received from others. His life linked with that of his grandfather — the stout-hearted pioneer who laid the foundations of our farm. So I think I have a pretty fair perspective of agricultural life — different from, and perhaps more human and personal than any that can be derived from books.

Sometimes, when I walk these old fields and muse on these moss-grown stone walls, I feel that I can repeople the past and make live again old scenes and forgotten memories.

The community of which I write is, in a very special sense, an American community. It is old as things go in America, for in our county men have been turning the furrows and reaping the harvests for more than two full centuries.

In 1833, the site of Chicago was marked by twelve frontier cabins; but in this old New York State county there were more people then than there are to-day. About seventy years ago we received a considerable influx of Irish immigration, mostly Protestant; but from then until recently the alien-born has been an almost unknown quantity. We have within our bounds two large quarries and a cement plant, where Italians and Eastern European races do dray-horse work; and on a few of our rough hillfarms, where the natives have grown weary of the struggle, an occasional newly arrived foreigner is trying to satisfy his traditional land-hunger.

Our county population is rapidly declining, and has been since 1860. It is less now than in 1835, and it is only about one half greater than in 1800. Ours is probably the most exclusively agricultural county in the state, — small in population, and without large wealth or even a single great individual fortune, — and yet a county where agriculture is on the whole fairly prosperous, although, in common with most of the East, we have been spared the wild land-boom that only a short year ago ran its predestined course in the Corn-Belt states. It is a land of hill and dale — some of it belonging to the Catskill Mountains, with steep escarpments and narrow valleys of denudation; some of it made up of long, billowy drumlins, the furrows from the glacial plough. It is a topography hopelessly rugged to the man born to the prairie states; but about us the hills are fertile hills, full of limestone drift where neither wheat nor alfalfa needs any special coaxing to succeed. It is on the past and the future of this particular countryside that I am led to muse — aided, perhaps, by hereditary memories.

From earliest pioneer times, almost until the Civil War, agriculture in this section remained typically a primitive art. There were so few things for which there was a recognized market and a definite price. Families lived mainly by their own production and by exchange with neighbors, supplemented by a system of barter at the country store. Every farm was a little kingdom in itself. We were too far from tide-water to sell much grain except wheat. Eggs were an uncertain and exceedingly cheap commodity. In New York City, butter from anywhere beyond Orange County was classed as ‘Western’ and sold at a greatly reduced price — for proof of which see the market reports of the Country Gentleman for 1847. We fattened some steers. I believe they must have been good ones, for my father has told me how they were sometimes fed until four quarts of oats could be poured on their broad backs without running off. They were not baby beef, but four-year-olds — thoroughly finished at the last. These readily traveled to market at Albany on their own legs, and sold for real money. Here too, in winter, fat dressed pork was a standard commodity — the buyers meeting the farmer on the one-time imperial highway, the Great Western Turnpike, two miles west of the Capitol, and swarming upon and examining his load without a word of permission or byyour-leave — a procedure far more suggestive of highwaymen making an organized attack than of honest merchants examining the wares.

The years of the Civil War brought us the first hay-press and a cash demand for hay; and a little later a great hop industry overspread our county. Hops were always a strange sort of a gambler’s chance, with lean years and fat years beyond any other crop. The industry — it was at certain periods almost a craze — lost some men their farms, and to others it brought what by our farm standards we think of as modest wealth; and it well nigh disappeared, even before the Eighteenth Amendment. To-day we are engaged principally in ministering to the needs of New York City for its milk-supply — the activity which seems to be the ultimate end of all New York State lands that are not level, fertile, and easily tilled.

As a county, we had once our brief heyday of industrial prosperity, which flowered three quarters of a century ago. The western slopes of the Catskill Mountains had then a superb covering of hemlock timber, — probably there was none better, — and this brought to the upper Schoharie Valley what was for that time a wonderful tannery development. The story has in it the making of a romance — stirring and pathetic. Those splendid stretches of dark hemlock forests were cut down for the bark alone, and the stripped white trunks were left where they fell, to provide material for great forest fires or to moulder back again into the soil from whence they came. A little — a very little — of the choicest pine was sawed, and teamed the long haul of forty miles, to tide-water on the Hudson; but an old man, who in his youth had been a part of what he told, said to me, ‘We never took a plank that had a little knot or even a gum-spot in it.’

Those halcyon days were not for long. A generation worked out the claim, the tanneries, every last one, fell into decay, and there is the making of another story — not a very romantic one — of how the bark-peelers and tanners remained behind, and in some cases became the foundation stock of certain communities which, as examples of arrested development, are a repetition of the mountain whites of the Southern Alleghanys.

Then there is no doubt that our agriculture, like that of all the old East, was profoundly affected by the Civil War. So far as our remote farms are concerned, the recent world-war was merely an episode, compared with the tremendous struggle that convulsed this country between 1860 and 1865. Until then, American rural life had been ultra-conservative and stationary. But marching and counter-marching for years over Southern battlefields made foot-loose soldiers of fortune out of tens of thousands of farm boys, who otherwise would surely have contendedly followed the plough on the family acres. It was the beginning of our since much-lamented drift to the cities and the exodus to the CornBelt States. The proof of this is the fact that nearly everywhere in our old agricultural communities population reached its high-water mark in the census of 1860.

As a matter of fact, we have really no data of any value concerning the population or the economics of farm communities. The smallest unit, so far as our census returns go, is the township or the incorporated village, while the Federal government declares all communities of less than 2500 inhabitants to be rural — a classification that may well excite either pity or contempt for those responsible. The only unit that can be of real value to the student of country life is the school district. There are many small industrial villages of a few hundred people which, in make-up and interest, are affiliated with the farm about as closely as a gilded country club is related to the Dorcas Society.

It is a bit inconsistent, perhaps, that as a farmer, with generations of farmers behind me, and with no remote ambition to change my occupation, I have, nevertheless, sometimes taken pains to enumerate and catalogue the Disadvantages of Country Living. There are a great many of them, and each separate one would afford material for an exhortation or a university thesis. Our whole rural social system is handicapped by lack of numbers, and even more by lack of wealth available for the maintenance of the common community activities and utilities. I might mention a few of these limitations.

For example, to begin at the very foundation, the cross-roads, one-room school there are well-nigh ten thousand of them in this Empire State alone — is at once the most expensive and most inefficient system of public education ever devised; yet because of fundamental conditions, of scanty and scattered population, and taxable wealth pitifully limited as compared with the great centres of population, it has not been easy, in spite of much earnest effort, to improve it much; it has certainly been impossible to put it on a par with the educational opportunity afforded every city child. We have always been proud to think how out of all proportion to his numbers, in the great activities of our country, — commercial and educational,— the farm-bred boy sits in the seats of the mighty. It is at the same time a splendid tribute to the value of the Spartan training of the farm, that he has achieved these honors in spite of, and not because of, his school advantages.

Then, witness our country churches. They are an entirely priceless asset of and contribution to our national life. It is widely recognized that the country is peculiarly the recruiting ground for the students of our theological seminaries and the soldiers of our Christian ministry. I like to believe that the country still remains the great conservator of our morals and the fountainhead of our ethics and our religion. But consider the peculiar problems of the country church, with congregations so widely scattered, with numbers so few, and with wealth so small. It is a long and sad and perplexing story.

Then there is the public-health situation. In every city trained experts,— chemists, bacteriologists, sanitarians,— by day and by night, in laboratory and in field, guard the water-supply from contamination, and watch to head off the first case of infectious disease. Well — in the country we drink out of our own typhoid-bearing family well, and there is none to say us nay. I presume we are within our rights as free and independent farm-folk on the land.

Yet even so — there are compensations. I know that vital statistics, as gathered and tabulated by state boards of health, seem to indicate that the death-rate of city and country is now approximately the same; but I do not believe that these correctly interpret the facts. To begin with, the classification adopted includes within the ‘rural areas’ many villages and industrial centres where conditions, both sanitary and moral, are of the worst. Was it not Elbert Hubbard who wrote that ‘God made the country and man made the city, but the Devil made the small town’? It is sound sociology, at any rate. Then, our cities have great numbers of what underwriters would designate as selected lives — our young folks, bred and reared on farms, but giving the best of their young lives to the city. The normal death-rate among that class is wonderfully small. But we back on the farms have also a constituency of selected lives — but selected in the wrong direction, for we have, left behind, more than our normal proportion of old men and women whose day is far spent. Our published tables of the death-rate per thousand cannot take account of these factors, for tables are wooden, mechanical statements at best.

Now I can review, by memory and by tradition and by the dates on the stones in our cemetery, the vital statistics of the old families who possess the farms around my home; and it is my firm impression that a majority of them saw eighty years and more. Somehow we have come to feel that the farmer who failed to reach the traditional fourscore years had been prematurely cut down. The facts are exactly these. We have vital statistics concerning all the people who live in communities of not exceeding 2500 inhabitants, but none that deal specifically with men actually on the land. I still cherish the pleasant belief that, above other men, the farmer may look forward to a sound digestion and a green old age.

Then there is the matter of police protection, the maintenance of law and order, and the safety of property in our rural districts—the need of which is no longer a myth, since good roads and automobiles are carrying city ruffianism far afield. Well, we are bidden to appeal to the constable, or the sheriff or his deputy — all of whom, in case of need, are about as available as a city fire department for a country conflagration. Also, in New York State, we have our force of 232 mounted police, — our rural constabulary, — good fellows sometimes, but devoted principally to enforcing the game laws, holding up rum-runners, and collecting fines for violations of the traffic ordinances. In every great centre of population there is, in the words of the song, —

But in the country — well, in the country we do as country-folk have done from the beginning.

Fire protection is in the same class. We stand sorrowful and helpless, and see the possessions of our neighbor — the hard-wrung results of years of toil — go up in a red flare at midnight. For all the good we can do, it would be about as well if we were in bed. It is true, we can ring the schoolhouse bell vigorously; and if we are early enough, we may be able to loose the kine from the stable, and perhaps drag to safety some portion of the household goods; but that is pretty poor work compared to the watchful waiting of a modern city fire department, equipped with all the means that enable them to snuff out 99 per cent of all fires before they reach serious proportions. Incidentally, it may be noted that the insurance rate for farm property upstate is about fifteen times that of property in downtown New York.

I might go further, and tell how we farmers are, on the whole, without art galleries —without concerts — without theatres — without so many institutions and opportunities that minister to city life.

Now these drawbacks to country living are, to a great extent, factors beyond control. I am not finding fault, — no one is greatly to blame, — but they are, nevertheless, hard unfortunate facts, which we cannot conceal from ourselves. Society, as expressed in government and legislation, must do something to correct them; but, after all, we farmers ourselves must do most to work out our own salvation. I consider that some of these things are disadvantages inseparable from life on the land. Yet, at the same time, I am equally sure that farm-life holds many compensations.

Now I approach this farm problem from the standpoint of one who has no expectation or desire to be anything but a farmer, and who is anxious that his son may find pleasure and satisfaction in the same calling on the same farm. Yet sometimes I cannot shut my eyes to this — that farming rarely yields to its votaries financial rewards equal to those they would have received if they had invested their lives in some other occupation. My people have been hard-handed men of the furrow, — men who have got up early and sometimes lain down late, — men who always saw the dawn, and whom the gloaming found still busy at their task. The eight-hour day had no place in their philosophy, and their wives as well knew the same Spartan life. It may be true that they succeeded better than most men of their kind; yet after all, if they had turned their life-energy and work into other channels, there might have been more time for study — more leisure for the gentle arts and graces of life.

Herein, then, is the hard problem of the farm. Concerning this, the farmer may allege some subtle social injustice. Feeding the world as he has, he may yet claim to have borne his undue share of its burdens.

What has been true of him as a proprietor has always been true of his paid helpers as well. The farm laborer, faithful, skillful, resourceful, as he often is, has never received — indeed, it never has been possible to pay him — a wage commensurate with those of other men. It is strange, it is unjust, but it is true, that the man engaged in producing food has always been underpaid as compared with men in almost any other line of human endeavor. Somehow, somewhere, our economics are out of joint, when a man guiding the plough, or husking corn, or milking cows, cannot be paid a wage approaching that received by the man in any one of a hundred manual trades. It is an old, old evil under the sun; but it ought not so to be, and neither the farmer nor his hired man will have received a fair deal until this is corrected.

Still, this fact remains. There is something in life on the land that grips us — those of us who are farm-minded. I think it is largely because we have never ceased to look for the ushering in of a Golden Age — next spring. In the past it has been too wet or too dry, or the grasshoppers have eaten up the meadows, the apple-scab has ruined the crop, or the palmer worm (whatever that may be) has taken our substance; but next year — next year we shall prosper and all will be well; for we deal not with prosaic, known things, but with the sunny unknown future; and the events are in the hands of God. Down in our hearts, perhaps, we are lured on by the gambler’s chance. Then, too, some of us love the great outdoors and the mystery and miracle of the rolling years with a love that we cannot tell. We find joys in wheatfields bowing to the breeze, and young corn dancing and gleaming in the sunshine, and cattle with full udders marching homeward when the sun is low.

I know that I shall work more hours than my fellows in the town. I know that I shall never make a million dollars. But then, too, I know that I shall not be obliged to lie while I am living, or be lied about after I am dead. And outside, the fields lie snow-covered and glistening in the snapping frost of this winter evening; but I see again the green mantle cover the earth, and hear the trees clap their hands — and I am well content.