sides of the remote parts of our State to plant his farm all over with blackberries and other small fruits with no customers except the squirrels and blackbirds. No; but let him who has the taste and skill for the business seek his farm near some large market where manure and fertilizers of all kinds can be purchased cheaply and in great abundance, pursue his one idea of producing the best vegetables and the largest quantity, and study the best methods of preparing them for the market. Let him get well acquainted with his customers, learn their individual and peculiar tastes and fancies, and thus succeed beyond all comparison. So let him, who, after careful consideration of the whole subject, decides that his circumstances and inclinations lead him to the raising of fine wooled sheep, persist in his study of this honorable calling until he succeeds, like a Hammond and Campbell, to both fortune and fame. Or, if he choose the dairy, let him study to know the best dairy stock; the best and most profitable methods of feeding and care; let him learn how and when to milk; how to take care of the milk; how to churn; what kind of a churn to use; how to put up his butter in the best possible shape; how and where to sell it, etc., and attain at last to the eminence of a Brooks, or a Bowditch, who never fail to get their seventy-five cents for every pound of butter they sell. If he is a man of keen judgment and close observation, let him raise the best cattle for breeding purposes. Let him devote his whole time and thoughts to this one exceedingly important department of our agricultural interests, and finally succeed in this way, in spite of all the difficulties which he may encounter, like a McMillan, of Ohio, who, though yet a young man, has attained great wealth and rendered valuable service to the cause in our country; or like the Winslows of almost our own State, who have risen from nothing to a large competency. There is not and never has been a man on the face of God's footstool, that can manage every department of what properly belongs to agriculture with success. It is the man of one idea that succeeds in every department of business. We love to revere and honor the name of Daniel Webster. A man who moved the governments of the world by the mighty power of his eloquent reasoning, and who stands in memory to-day as the peer of any statesman who ever lived, and yet he would never have been heard of so far away from Franklin as this, if he had not pursued faithfully and to the very end his one idea. Daniel Webster as a farmer would have been a failure; as a merchant he would have disastrously failed; as anything but a lawyer and statesman he must have failed. The eminent success of such philosophers as Franklin and Fulton and Morse and Howe and Stephenson, and multitudes of others, and the almost infinite advantage which they have been to the world, was the result of one idea. Had A. T. Stewart attempted to have managed every department of trade, selling dry goods, groceries, hardware, agricultural implements, flour and grain, books, etc., he never could have attained to his immense wealth and earned the title of Merchant Prince of America. Oliver Dalrymple of St. Paul, Minnesota, would never have made seventy-five thousand dollars in three successive years since the war in the raising of wheat if he had pursued a course of mixed farming, but his whole success is due to his managing one department of agriculture with great skill and energy. Instances of this same character could be quoted without number or limit, while instances of failure from efforts to spread out in all directions are even more numerous. I know a man who for nineteen years pursued a straight and onward course in one line of merchandise and with immense success, so that he could count his thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars. He then began to think that having been so exceedingly successful in the past he had capacities for any emergency, and stepping outside of his known beaten course he fell, and not only he was flat broke without a dollar he could call his own, but large numbers of others were financially ruined on account of his mistake. Experience teaches that the great majority of losses and failures are due to this same thing, the fact that people will overstep their abilities and attempt to do all things when they can do but few things. If a man can do one thing well he has thus succeeded. If he has attempted to do many things and only half done any he has signally failed. The example which God has given us is perfection. We can never attain to it. The nearer we approach it the greater our success. This leads me to the very important subject of high farming. At the present cost of labor it is of the utmost importance that all our work should be done by machinery that can be done by it, To do this most New Hampshire farmers will be obliged to cultivate only their smoothest and best lands. I find that it costs but a very little more per acre to cut and store hay with the use of the mower, tedder-rake and horse pitch-fork where two and onehalf tons grow on one acre than it does where one ton grows to the acre, while the expense of filling the barn is vastly less in the one case than in the other. To make farming pay we must then raise our hay on the best fields and turn the poor fields out to pasture. It costs but a trifle more labor to cultivate an acre of corn that will produce seventy-five bushels than to cultivate an acre that will produce but thirty bushels. I believe this principle holds good in the cultivation of all farm crops and should invariably be put in practice unless very peculiar circumstances can be shown as an argument against it. Cultivate such fields and such only as will produce the largest crops with the least manual labor. And high farming is not confined to the cultivation of the soil alone but pertains to all the operations of the farm. My neighbor says he can burn a cord of wood in boiling a kettle of water. He says further that he can take a nice shote weighing two hundred pounds and feed him ten bushels of meal, and the animal will not weigh a single pound more when he has eaten the meal than before. Now everybody knows that the cheapest way to boil water is to feed the furnace with fuel just as fast as it can be consumed. So if you would fatten a hog in the cheapest possible manner give him all you can possiby induce him to eat. A cow will have about so much feed to support herself, and if you expect her to give you any milk you must give her more than she needs for her own use, and then she will repay you for the whole expense with large profit. With very few exceptions it is the rule the world over, that he who raises the largest crops per acre, who has the largest and finest stock, who feeds his land, his cattle, his swine and everything which he kceps or raises in the best manner, is the man who makes the most money. The old adage, "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well," holds as good with all farming operations as with anything else. Then, fellow farmers, let us cultivate less acres but be sure to be constantly increasing the quantity of our crops. No farmer can be called successful while he rests satisfied with cutting as much hay as he did the year before, or raising any leading crop, and finds he has only as much as he has had in the past. But by high cultivation, let him prove year by year, as he certainly can except in extreme cases, that our farms have never produced what they are capable of. It is my conviction, based upon considerable observation during the past fifteen years, that if a common sense view of farming in New Hampshire is taken, our sons and daughters will not be compelled to go to other states to seek their fortune in trade and other ways, but may be led to see the comforts as well as profits of the New Hampshire farms. Let us break loose from old fogy notions and teach our children so. Let us cultivate our best fields only, and on them let us produce the largest crops. Let us raise the best of stock, and get our steers as large and as fit for the shambles at two and a half years old, by high feeding and great care, as our neighbors do at four and a half years of age, thus saving fully one-third of the expense. Let us study profit at every point; discard everything that does not pay; seize upon the few paying things and pursue them with great vigor, and then the millennial day for New Hampshire farmers will have come. THE VICTOR HORSE HOE. |