Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1874 — The Way to Make Enterprising Farmers. [ARTICLE]

The Way to Make Enterprising Farmers.

In the first place there must be successful farmers to teach beginners the correct principles and the better and most reliable practices of agriculture. A farmer who dislikes his livelihood—who don’t care to be a successful* tiller of the soil, and would abandon farming wholly if he could engage in any other pursuit—is not the man to instruct beginners in the great art of agriculture. Such men always drive their sons and employes from the farm. Farming is looked upon by them as the most unsatisfactory and unprofitable business that they can engage in. Hence they are always morose and crochety and forever grumbling that farming don't pay, and they do not want their sons to engage in such business. The same is true with reference to most of our schools and colleges. The practices and courses of instruction adopted at agricultural institutions, thus far, have been educating young men away from the farm rather than toward it. The agricultural colleges are as yet an unfinished experiment. How much aid the farmer* can derive from the schools remains to be seen. But there is a work which can be done before the young man is given into the hands of professional instructors. He can be in terested in the farm or disgusted with it before he leaves the paternal roof.

In this early training lies the secret of holding the young men. Let there be intelligent and enterprising farmers to instruct ? beginners in the better practices of farming. Let the farmer lighten the labor which he puts upon his son by telling him all he knows about the reasons for doing it. Explain to him the processes of nature, so far as they are known, and show him the things which remain to be discovered. Show him that agriculture is only just begi n ningto understand itself. Excite him to think by mentioning the many things a farmer does without knowing why he does them. Induce him to, think of these things and he will perceive that every thing which invites investigation is not away from the farm. Show him that, by pushing ahead and availing himself of new discoveries and ideas, he can make a better farmer than his father. This is the way men in other occupations hold their sons to carry on the enterprises which they have labored to promote; and thus must the farmer gain early the interest and sympathy of his boy if the boy is to build onward and upward upon foundations which his father has laid. There is no class of citizens that have so much leisure and such easy times and that can live so luxuriously as farmers, if they understand their business., True, at certain periods of the year farmers must labor unremittingly ’ for a few days, after which their duties are light for days, weeks and months. Farmers should exercise themselves to love their employment.— New York Herald.