The farmstead: The making of the rural home and the lay-out of the farm / (5th edition)

The Rural Science Series Edited by L. H. Bailey
THE FARMSTEAD
ISAAC PHILLIPS ROBERTS
Director of the College of Agriculture and Professor of Agriculture in Cornell University; author of “The Fertility of the Land”
FIFTH EDITION
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1910 All rights reserved
Copyright, 1900 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped January, 1900 Reprinted August, 1902; January, 1905; August, 1907; June, 1910
Mount Pleasant Press J. Horace McFarland Company Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
THE FARMSTEAD
Man is made partly by heredity, partly by environment; both may be controlled and modified to a far greater extent than is generally supposed. In speaking of farm life, its disadvantages are frequently emphasized, while its possible advantages as an environment for the development of the finest quality of human nature are as often ignored or overlooked.
Nature, with her ever-varying form and color, beauty and symmetry, is forgotten in the city; the shady forest, the meadow brook, the waving fields, are unknown. There, instead, is incessant noise, the clang and clash of trade, towering and ugly buildings, skies darkened by the smoke of factories, children who never saw a tree or played elsewhere than upon a hard and filthy pavement; and worst of all is the nerve-destroying haste and unequal competition, wearing out body and soul. In rural life, however tame and lonely, the home is not merely a few square feet hedged in by brick walls, but the whole wide countryside: the barns, the fields, the woods, the orchards, the animals wild and domesticated, the outlook over hill and valley—these all constitute the farmer’s home.