Another, is that there is a woeful benightedness in providing stables suitable to milk in, and easy and healthful for the cows to live in, as they should be allowed to do for more than half of the hours of the year. The advanced dairymen who have plank floors daily littered, cleaned, and cleansed, drops in the floor, and clean walks in the rear of the cows, well-ventilated, but warm, non-freezing stables, would be amazed and disgusted to enter what I greatly fear are a majority of the stables of the State, in which the cows are thrust to endure a painful and filthy existence. When purity of product has a great influence in gauging the price, and the health of consumers is at stake, this neglect in providing better and more cleanly stabling is one of the crying ills of our dairy system. I am glad to know that the supervision of the health officials of Milwaukee extends to the stables of the cows that produce the milk that is allowed to be sold in that city. It would be well if it was made the imperative duty of the health officials of every town to forcibly establish the blessings of a decent civilization in the cow stables of more than half of the farmers of Wisconsin. I am moved to thus speak because of what I have seen—and smelled. I will not quarrel with a man who claims the unalienable right to rot, as a hermit, but I deny his right to freely make and sell to others, unwholesome food, into which he has mingled filth and the germs of disease and death. It is shameful to neglect to provide good and healthful stables for food-producing dairy stock—one that calls for vengeance on a criminality.
Another neglected opportunity of the dairymen to increase the number of head their farms might subsist, and thus increase their profits, especially those who occupy our highest priced lands, is in their declining to adopt the system of soiling. I do not know of a highly successful dairyman in the State who has not adopted it, in part, at least—enough to save his cows when famine is in sight. Neither do I believe there is one who would not be more successful if he should practice it more. The arrived-at goal of the select few who keep as many cows as they have acres of land, has been reached by and through the soiling process; and approximate successes like theirs must be achieved by traveling the same route. There are those who are ensmalling their pastures, and at the same time, increasing their herds, because the lands taken from the pasture and devoted to soiling crops produce more than the old herds can consume. The wandering cow feeds herself, in fact, from what might be the choicest product of her own milk, tramps the life out of much more, and tosses her head in disdain at much that if cut and properly fed in the stall, she would eat with a relish; so that it may be safely said that two, and some practical men say three, cows might be well-fed through soiling, on the same land that one is by the system of exclusive pasturing.
Another, it may well be called the lost opportunity—that grows out of the neglected ones alluded to, is that the cows are not kept in good milking condition more of the time of the year. The men who seize and utilize the few opportunities I have mentioned very soon learn that they have an almost perpetual fount of wealth; and that they can not afford to dry it up, and wait for spring. Putting in more time for the cow to produce, inevitably convinces them of the fact that the larger part of the cow’s earnings are made when dairy products are high in price; and they are dull, indeed, if they do not see in that a revelation that more winter dairying would pay. I am aware that the flippant answer made by those disinclined to adopt soiling and winter dairying, is, that they involve employment of more manual labor on a given number of acres, and that reliable farm labor is hard to get and troublesome to keep. This is the first superficial pretext of nine-tenths of those advanced enough to ever give these subjects a serious thought. Nevertheless, the practice of these innovations are essential in the higher grade of farming; and that practice, instead of being an ill, is a blessing to the farm, to the farmer, to his older children, and to the hired laborer; for it gives all of them steady and profitable employment, while the present system requires the far greater proportion of labor in the spring and summer months, and furnishes less to do in winter for the hired man and the grown-up boys and girls. They thus lounge, often, in debasing idleness, or are early weaned from the farm, and go away, never to return to partake of its real, invigorating life, its independence, and its joys. The dairy, with the accompaniment of soiling and more production of dairy products in the winter, would make the farm more like a factory, with every wheel in motion almost the entire year. The home and the family of the dairy farmer should be as large as the capacity of the man and the woman at the helm; and as steady employment as that which must be given to the store or shop would go a long way in developing and increasing the capacity of the whole force to manage more. Giving regular employment to good men on the farm makes it far easier to get and to keep them; and it retains a more brawny set of men, who are otherwise enticed to the factories and railways that give steady work, and so have the pick of the intelligent and most reliable ones. It is an accomplishment in a farmer and his wife to know how to get, and how to keep good, faithful hired men. I know of those who are slaves, because they don’t know how. Many of them ascribe it to the men, when they themselves are principally at fault. There is a mortal dread of “tramps,” especially among the more ignorant farmers. But I aver that the common system of almost exclusive grain farming that crowds most of the labor of the year into a few spring and summer months, is a direct cause of much of the tramp evil of which so many farmers complain. It manufactures the tramps who rove from necessity, and even drives out their own children to swell the ranks of those in search of a job. On the other hand, a large increase of milk-stock kept on the farm necessitates the retention of most of the manual force of the summer months. Not how to dispense with hired labor or the labor of his children, but how to profitably employ and elevate it, and make it inviting, rather than abhorrent and slavish, is the problem the progressive farmer should study to solve. The manufacturer counts upon additional gains through the addition of well-employed laborers. The farmer could do the same if he used more educated brains and a little less over-taxed muscle in his business. The bulk of every fortune steadily acquired, consists of the success of its possessor in getting, honestly or dishonestly, a profit from the labors of others. This must be so, so long as it is an axiom in political economy that labor is the basis of all wealth. The owner of the soil can succeed in winning more than a pro rata proportion, just in the ratio of his ability to make his brains help the work of his hands.
I know of whole sections, and even contiguous miles square, on which the system of farming prevails that I have condemned—the hired man is unknown, save only for short periods of the year—the children gone to the cities, to the factories, the railroads, or to the West—the land denuded of stock, almost, as well as of the rightful ones to care for it; and half-impoverished farms, half farmed by the old folks, or continuously cropped on shares by more indigent neighbors. Possessions that by nature are as fair as ever the sun shone upon, that do not, and can not now pay five per cent interest on $25 per acre; when well managed dairy farms in the same county pay more than that per cent on a basis of $100 per acre. In view of these patent facts that stare us in the face, is it any wonder that some of us feel we have a loud call to dispense the pure dairy gospel to these perishing sinners who thus neglect their grand opportunities.
In some one of the first sentences of this paper I alluded to the influence of good and profitable farming in improving the condition and standing of the farmer, as a man among men. This, after all, is the crowning objective point, or should be, of all those who make the most of the opportunities the great mass neglect. If with all his getting a man does not get some real wisdom, some development in stalwart morality, and a higher cultivation of the mind, it needs no Solomon or Bible to tell the on-lookers that he is a comparative failure; and it ought to be apparent to himself. The legitimate profits of a higher grade of farming ought to be expended to elevate the farmer, his wife, his children, and all the attendants whom he directs. Part of them should appear in the form of better and more comfortable houses and barns, finer stock, better horses, better roads and school-houses, a larger list of newspapers and periodicals, better libraries and better housekeeping, and more cheery houses in which intelligence and music are not strangers. It is as important that a man should spend his earnings aright, as that he should use his energies and talents to earn. It is not a manly element in a man whose chief forte is that he can hold all he can get. A clam can do that, and not suffer much, either, in a comparison of brains with the groveling getter of mere wealth. The high behest to earn much, by and through grand opportunities to labor and direct labor, blossoms into blessing in its best sense only when the earnings are spent to increase the intelligence, add to the comforts, and aid men to discharge their private and public duties more nobly than it is possible for a man to do with an income that simply gives him bread.
Because the earnings of the farm are not more frequently spent in thus installing a section of paradise on the farm, is the real cause of the stampede therefrom of many of the smart ones who deem the struggle for elevation there a hopeless one, and, catching an inspiration from the shriek of civilization that announces each swiftly flying train, they turn their backs on what have been to them farm dungeons, and mingle with the surging throng in quest of a better condition. That they are often mistaken and baffled in taking such a route, does not deter a new crowd from going. They fly from what they dread, as much as they are inspired by what they hope to win. These things ought not so to be; and a wise improvement of the many neglected opportunities on the farm would go far to rectify the ills they fly from, but from which yet few escape.
Say what we will about all its defects, its uninviting toil, and low wages, agriculture disenthralled of its ignorance is the basis rock of our hope; and he is a slanderer of the noblest occupation who raises the veil to expose its defects and servility for any other purpose than to help make greener its verdure, and brighten its bloom.
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