INTRODUCTION.
A farm is the only proper home. Working for yourself is the only true independence. Labor on the land in the open gives health and long life. Raise a living and sell the surplus. Work all the time, but don’t overwork. Make faces at the cynic who says the farmer and his wife and children work fifteen hours a day and then starve. It isn’t so. Work alone is not farming; you must manage. Farming needs intelligence and care, nothing more so. Everywhere you see good farm-homes and poor ones; the difference is in the farmer. What the good farmers do, all can do.
In this book, the author tells how to lay out the land, how to prepare and plant and harvest, and how to make life joyous. He has boiled down the experience of himself and his friends and the information contained in bulletins and books and catalogs. A cobbler or clerk or typo, can take this book and with his tennis-made muscle and his trade accuracy can make a bare living the first year, a good living the second, and start a bank account the third. I know it because I helped do it in my youth and I have seen it done all my life.
One of the obstacles in the way of town families going to the country is separation from friends and going among strangers. Another is the conscious ignorance of the work and a sense of helplessness. These are real and valid difficulties. They are equivalent to the difficulties besetting a German or Norwegian farmer coming alone into an American community in a new state. The hundreds of thousands of European farmers who came to the states every year from the forties to the end of the eighties overcame this difficulty by organizing colonies of friends and neighbors and settling in one spot. They thus had society and they had the benefit of their best leaders. Then their old friends kept coming in smaller squads. This is the way for town people to do. Find six or ten or a dozen and go together. Even if all are not relatives or friends they may be of the same class or trade.
To any such colony I will furnish the money to pay for all the land they need and let them begin paying the cost price of it at the end of five years and finish in ten, with 4 per cent. interest. They may pick the tract and bargain for the price. Upon their showing that the agreed number are ready to go and are able to make the improvements and provide the working equipment, I will advance the money to pay for the land. They can divide it up to suit themselves.
I have furnished farms already plowed, fenced and housed, and horse and cow free of charge. But these empty-handed folk, who have saved nothing out of their former occupation, lack the qualities to manage for themselves and to succeed at farming. They are too helpless and dependent. Their best plan is to hire out in the country until they learn farm work and life, then rent a piece of land, and then buy.
How much land shall each one have, how much can he properly cultivate? That depends on what he raises, and this governs his location and the price of the land. With present methods, he will need 20 acres if he keeps a dairy of ten cows; or, 10 acres if he raises vegetables, small fruit, poultry and milk; or, four acres is enough for truck and a horse and cow, while one acre is enough if he raises only celery, asparagus or tomatoes. The price of land is influenced by social conditions, speculation, proximity to and quality of market and agricultural adaptability, all the way from $5.00 an acre to $250.00. There is plenty of it not above the value of the public and private improvements. It is useless to buy a farm of 160 acres for one family. They cannot work it, it is a dead expense, they would be lonesome, would starve and quit. But a colony, settling as neighbors on well-chosen land for which they pay only when they have had time to earn it, will have every opportunity to succeed.
Only in rare cases would I advise town dwellers to go singly to the country; they are disqualified by their social and industrial habits. A colony of friends or Co-operative Associations overcome the difficulties and do in fact assure success to any one possessed of industry and frugality.
By intensive cultivation is meant, not any particular kind of product, but farming the land thoroughly, getting the best yield and the best quality out of every acre, the best seeds and the best breeds and the best way of disposing of the crop when you get it. The farm or garden may be in the vegetable or small fruit or corn and hay or dairying section. In either case, you can cultivate it intensively, which is thoroughly.
The book will tell you in A, B, C style how to farm. I am asked to tell what to do with the crop after you have raised it, how to buy what you don’t raise, and how to make social substitutes for the city crowds and sights.
Associate! Co-operate!
You may not know it, but the world is turning from private trade to co-operation at a fast rate. In some countries most of the farmers do all their business by co-operation.
Co-operation is simple and sure and safe, when enough people want it and are shown how.
I have practiced co-operation in my business for twenty-three years. I have been intimate with it the world over for twenty-five years. I have seen it grow and grow until it numbers its millions of workers in some countries, and is doubling every five years in many countries and states. Though I am a manufacturer, my chief occupation is to preach and teach co-operation to farmers—at my own expense.
Co-operative creameries have changed Minnesota from a declining wheat state to a rich dairy state. Co-operation has saved the California orange grower from bankruptcy and made him prosperous; it has raised Denmark’s exports of butter, eggs and bacon from eighteen to eighty millions a year, and it has almost cut off our supply of policemen and politicians from Ireland, because over a thousand co-operative associations have grown up there in twenty years.
After you have undertaken what this book tells you all about, you want to count on forming co-operative associations with your neighbors to do all the business that you have. You raise your own crop; but pack it, ship it and sell it through your association. You use bought goods, but buy them all through the association. That gives you a saving in expenses, a saving in price, and a better quality. What is still more, it makes better neighbors of you, and rids you entirely of the demoralizing tricks of the trade, and prevents you figuring how to get the best trade out of the other fellow. You are yourself “the other fellow.” In the co-operative way, your interest lies in producing the best stuff, which will gradually improve your motives. Co-operation fits any sort of business, if there is enough of it.
One hundred and fifty cows are needed to start a cheese factory, 250 for a milk shipping association, 500 for a butter creamery; fewer than these do not pay.
For co-operation in raising vegetables and small fruits, no fixed quantity of product is required; two or more persons working together is better than each for himself.
Talk it up as neighbors and then hold a meeting. Let all who want to join, sign an agreement to deliver all their truck to the association and pay a membership fee of $5.00 or over. Each member should have an equal voice regardless of his acreage. Organize, either as a corporation or a limited partnership. Elect the best qualified men to be officers, and then give them unqualified support. Select a manager and see to the marketing arrangements. If the quantity raised is large enough, it is best to have your own receiving and selling agent in the principal market. Every member must make a legal contract with the association to submit to its rules about condition, packing and delivering, to apply to his entire crop. Good quality, reliable packing and regular supply are essential to good prices.
The manager or inspector must have full authority. Each member’s delivery is graded, weighed, measured or counted and accurately recorded. Once a month the account from each grade is made up, and the proceeds, after paying expenses, are paid over.
The manager should be an experienced trucker, competent to instruct and advise about the work of planting, growing and gathering. The growers meet each other at the station, and compare notes. They all learn what is known by the most expert among them. They can arrange to have one man gather up the crops from several places and make one load to the packing-house, taking turn about in this service. Small or poor growers may be admitted with a nominal payment, even as low as 25 cents, the remainder to be paid by a 5 per cent. deduction from his proceeds.
The association and management can also fill the assembled orders of members for fertilizer, seed, implements and packing material, at wholesale prices. In time you will make your own boxes, erect a cannery for the surplus and even buy your own groceries co-operatively.
You can form a credit society with unlimited liability, to receive on deposit the members’ surplus and borrow from the city. That money is lent, for productive uses only, to members of known ability and honesty, who give two similar members as security.
When you get safely started in one kind of co-operative association, you will easily go to the next, as the Danes and the Irish have done.
St. Louis, Mo.
N. O. Nelson.