By Clarence Poe
Progressive Farmer
Love your farm. Every farmer should not only love his work as the artist loves his work, but in the same spirit, too, every farmer should love his farm itself as he would love a favorite horse or dog. He should know every rod of the ground, should known just what each acre is best adapted to, should feel a joy and price in having every hill and valley look its best, and he should be much ashamed to have a field scarred with gullies as he would be to have a beautiful colt marked with lashes; as much ashamed as to have a piece of ground worn out from ill treatment as to have a horse gaunt and bony from neglect; as much hurt by seeing his acres sick from wretched management as he would be to see his cows half-starved from the same cause.
Love your ground—that piece of God’s creating which you hold in fee simple. Fatten up poorer parts as carefully as you would an ailing collie. Heal the washed, torn places in the hillsides as you would the barb-scars on your pony. Feed with legumes and soiling crops and fertilizers the barren and gullied patch that needs especial attention; nurse it back to life and beauty and fruitfulness. Make a meadow of the bottom that is inclined to wash; watch it and care for it until the kindly root-masses heal every gaping wound and in one unbroken surface the “tides of grass break into foam of flowers” upon the outer edges. Don’t forget even the forest lands. See that every are of woodland has enough trees on it to make it profitable—“a good stand” of the timber crop as well as every other crop. Have an eye to the beautiful in laying off the cleared fields, a tree here and there, not wretched beggar’s coat mixture of little patches and little rents; rather broad fields of fully tended, and of as nearly uniform fertility as possible, making of your growing crops as it were, a beautiful garment, whole and unbroken, to clothe the fruitful acres God has given you to keep and tend even as He gave the First Garden into the keeping of our first parents.
And so again we say, love your farm. Make it a place of beauty, a place of joyous fruitfulness, an example for your neighbors, a heritage for your children. Make improvements on it that will last beyond your day. Make an ample yard about it with all the old fashioned flowers that your grandmother knew; set a great orchard near it, bearing many manner of fruits; lay off roads and walks leading to it and keep them up; plant hedges along the approaches and flowering bulbs, crape myrtles and spirea and privet and roses—so that your grandchildren will some day speak of their grandsire, who cared enough for the beautiful and loved the farm well enough to have for them this abiding glory of tree and shrub and flower.
Name the farm, too; treasure up its history; preserve the traditions of all the romance and adventure and humor and pathos that are in any way connected with it; and if some of the young folks must leave it, let them look back to it with happy memories of beauty and worthy ideals and well-ordered industry.
We have not developed in this country, as we should, the intense pride that the Englishman feels in being a landowner. It gives a man a distinction that homeless man has not. He is a better citizen, a freeholder, a guardian holding in trust a piece of creation direct from the hands of the Almighty. And yet how many—alas, how many!—who have such talents in their keeping are indeed unprofitable servants—not so much as keeping their treasure unhurt (as the one-talent man in the Bible did) but wearing out and destroying in one brief lifetime the heritage that the Creator intended to remain fertile and fruitful, to feed and nurture our human race, as long as the earth shall last.
Love your farm. If you cannot be proud of it now, begin today to make it as thing you can be proud of. Much dignity has come to you in that you are owner and caretaker for a part of God’s footstool; show yourself worthy of that dignity. Watch earnestly over every acre. Let no day go by that you do not add something of comeliness and potential fertility to its fields. And finally leave some spot beneath the shade of some giant tree where at last, “like as a shock of corn cometh in his season,” you can lay down your weary body, leaving the world a little better for your having lived in it, and earning the approval of the Great Father who made the care of the fields and gardens the first task given man: “Well done.”
From page 3 of the Danbury Reporter, Wednesday, March 18, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068291/1925-03-18/ed-1/seq-3/#words=March+18%2C+1925
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