Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 December 1882 — About Small Farms. [ARTICLE]

About Small Farms.

According to the census there were 4,008,907 farms in the United States in 1880. No doubt this number has increased perhaps 200,000 since then, as emigration has been large, and there has been a fever for “going West,” but the fact to be especially noted is, that only 139,241 were farms of less than ten acres. Farmers’ clubs and farmers’ journals have been scolding agriculturists for not working small farms, but people generally know their own interests best. Land is constantly growing in value in this country, 1 and at the end of a long life the farmer with the most land is the best off. He may have made no more than a bare living with his broad acres; but the land, which, when ha bought was worjfch, |Otily $5 an acre, has a market value of S6O to SIOO an acre. Then again, while land is cheap it does not pay to speed money in costly manures or to farm high; it is more profitable to buy virgin l©nd and exhapst it by repeated cropping. Yet over and over again the critics of the farmers tell tlieip that they ought to neglect wheat fml corn, and grow: cucumber* and berries on .ten-acre lots; but the actual expedience of the farmer, is that it is the large farm which pays best in the long run. When laud gets very dear, then wUI come the time to employ costiy manures and labor in the cultivation of the soil.— Demorext’s Monthly.