People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 March 1894 — A LETTER [ARTICLE]

A LETTER

To the Farmer* of Jasper Co., Indiana. Those tired farmers who have carefully read the report.of the Jasper County Farmers’ Institute, which appeared in the Pilot of Feb. 2nd, and also a more complete report that appeared subsequently and considered them in connection with the stern realities and conditions with which the tired farmers are surrounded, will certainly put on their thinking caps. The writer of the first report complains of a meager attendance. If he is a practical farmer (by which we mean ono who has to get up and do his own hustling) he would have known the cause of the slim attendance, which was that they (the tired farmers) were actively engaged in watching for an opportunity to reduce the over production, in order that they may be able to come up, or come down, with an installment of tax that comes due on the third Monday in April next. But the writer of the first report is hopeful. He seems to think that “in time” you will give up your watch in" and take an active part in learning how to increase the over production. Only a short time since three car loads of good, young horses were shipped from this county, the average purchasing price being $52 per head and yet a loan of one hundred dollars for one year, with the usual number of renewals required for that length of time, has, in many instances, commanded SSO. When the tired farmers hold an institute, let one question be, “llcw to raise a good horse and sell it at six years old at a profit for $50,” and if you are unable to find out just how it can be done, call in some one who has never tried it, pay him about ten dollars, pay strict attention to what he says and —and when he is through you will go away feeling (for that ten dollars) “greatly benefitted” and no politics in it either, and you will find your institute will “grow in favor every year, and the time will come when their meaning and benefit will be fully appreciated.” They will “show the spirit of enterprise” by discussing both sides of the question: viz, the possibility and the impossibility of raising horses and selling them as has already been stated; of raising wool and lambs, cattle and ail kinds of grain at present prices at a profit, the practicability or the impracticability of producing more, while we are at this time producing at a loss. Don’t it look as though the more w T e produce the more we lose? The first report says, “It brings together the educated farmers.” Perhaps by such the writer meant those who were learned in the art of curing over production by increasing it, and “so better the results of the years of toil,” In the second report you can notice much that is interesting, but to the most of us. situated as we are, not altogether : practical, as perhaps some of us have tried to our cost. It is pleasant to us, in fact about all the pleasure we can get or have

had for some time, whose heads have grown gray; whose sight has grown dim, and shoulders stooped; whose hands are calloused with the ceaseless toil of a long life; whose faces bear more marks of care add anxiety than of time, to go back to the scenes of our childhood; to go back in memory to the old log school, where we sat on the smooth side of a slab with our feet six inches above the puncheon floor. The gray haired but keen eyed teacher with his birch switch. The great staring fireplace as it appeared to us, black and grim, on that warm and sleepy kind of an afternoon, when the mosquitoes were in full force, and then we remember the plow with the w x ooden mould-board, and the crops we used to raise on the new, fresh and quick soil. And then too, in memory, we pound the corn in the hollowed out stump to make the meal. All these and many more of the scenes of our youth and early manhood come back to U 3. We remember that we were “up with the times” then, and we wonder why we are so far behind now. We produce more, and have more labor saving machinery than we ever dreamed of in our younger days, and yet our labor yields little besides care and anxiety. Wo have not been negligent in our business, but the “odds” are against us. So for the second subject on the program of the Tired Farmers’ Institute we suggest the following: viz, Why is it that in trying to be progressive we not only fail but suffer loss? There were several subjects discussed at the Farmers’ Institute whose report we have referred to, which might, by changing slightly, interest us us greatly. For instance, their subject, “The Corn Crop and how to Utilize it,” could be mace to read, “The Corn Crop and how it is Utilized.” Of course there would be no politics in that subject—oh no—and then we could Just resolve, “That we favor an increase in the appropriation by the state legislature for the purpose of aiding in institute work to the amount of $10,000.” “Oh, consistency, thou art a jewel.” A Farmer.