Norwich Bulletin Newspaper, January 2, 1911, Page 19

BULLETIN, MONDAY, JANUARY 2, 1911 The 20th Century Slogan Young Man, Go East! and Develop the Land—There’s Money in It. Fifty years ago the Wise Men of the East were unanimously shouting : “Young Man, GO WEST!” I'hat was about the middle of the Nineteenth century. This is beginning the second decade of the Twentieth, and the wise men of the West are now calling out: “Young man, GO EAST! —or, if you are already in the East, for the Lord’s sake, STAY THERE!” The really good farming land of the west is pretty well taken up. Do you suppose government and people would be spending hundreds of millions of doliars in damming rivers and digging tunncls to get and carry water on to arid deserts, if there were plenty of better land to be had for the pre-empting? The time has passed when the ambitious young farmer of New England can desert his fathers’ old farm and get a bigger one of better land out west, rich with the untilled increment of untold ages, just for living on it three or five years. If there is any such virgin land still remaining untaken it is because it is so inaccessible, so remote from all possible mar- kets, so isolated by reason of exorbitant transportation rates, that its crops, no matter how good, will not pay cost of market- ing. The west is still a wealth-giver to farmers of ample capi- tal who can farm townships and counties, rather than quarter- sections. But for the avers farmer it is no longer the Land of Promise; certainly not the Land of Performance. Land in the East is cheaper than like land in the West, to- day. yme years ago an lllinois mer having 160 acres of fand sold it for about $125 an acre, came to an eastern New York T e himseli admitted to be a better farm, than hali the money Moreover, the eastern farmer lives next door to his market, almost in its back-yard. le can study the demands of his mar- ket, year by year, fit his production to its calls, and sell his produce at t-hand, without having to lose all his profit on freight and cartage and commission charges. Statistics show clearly that the yield, per acre, of nearly all the staple crops greater today in the so-called “worn-out” states of New England than in the ern states especially de- voted to growing those crops. A Boston magazine is authority for the statement, said to be based on crop reports, that the “manufacturing state” of Massachusetts alone produces agricul- taral products worth four and a half times as much as those of “agricultural Kamsas.” DMassachuseits has an area of 7,800 square miles; Kansas an area of about 80,000 square miles—more than eleven time as much. Kan 1as to hunt its market all over the round globe, from St. I to Liverpool and from Quebec to Calcutta, while Massachusetts is it own market for all it can raise and a ity lot more. ACCESSIBLE MARKETS. Grow What the Market Needs and the Market will Need You. Really, in this matter of markets the eastern farmer has sn advantage over his western competitor which not one in a bundred appreciatcs at all—which only those who have tried to farm it in both sections can appreciate fully Take for instance our own two counties of New London and Windham ; look at the always hungry, markets for farmers’ prodace which are supplied by the bustling thousands of Nor- wich and New London and \Willimantic and Putnam and Dan- jelson, right within their own geographical hmits, with such cities as Hastford and New Haven d Providence and Wor- cester just over the lines, but all within reach of a hand-shake. You will hunt the great west for n a long day beiore you will find a farming area of 630,000 better acres than those of the two counties, with hali as many good and attainable markets. If a farmer wants to make money at farming, he has got to mork. But he can work—work like the very Old Scratch from daylight to dark—and yet fail to make money. It isn't work alome that brings him in the ducats—it is knowing how to work and what to work at. A farmer may put in years of hard work clearing up brushy hill-lands, and setting out and raising goose- He may raise mighty good gooseberries and by the carload. But if he hasn’t anv market for them to speak of, can’t sell them, can’t eat them and can’t make champagne out of them ~—as they do in Europe—how much money will he ever make off hie gooseberry park?> He will be “out” his land, and “out” rvis labor, and “out” the money he paid for the sets—and “in” the poorhouse, sooner or later. Yet, that man might have made a very good thing off his scrub Jand, if he had g ing hoop poles on it, or Christ- mas trees, or “American holly” bushes, or anything else it was made to grow and wanted to grow—PROVIDED he had a good bandy market jor hoop poles and Christmas trees and holly sprays. There’s the nub of the whole matter, THE MARKET. Tt fsn’t so much what you like to raise, or what you think you ought to raise—it’s what you can sell when you've raised it that brings in the dosh. Right there is where a whole lot of us farm- ers “ball up.” We know what we like to do, and we think we know what our land will do. So we raise that sort of stuff and then take our chances oi “working it off” on somebody for some- thing, be it more or less. on the other hand, we first found out what our handiest market wants, wants badly, is willing to pay well for, and then raised that, our trouble would be less in finding customers than in keeping customers from stripping us of what we need to save for our own use. : GROWING PIGS FOR MARKET. Meeting the Requirements of the Trade Spells Quick Sales at Good Profits. Of course, Eastern Connecticut farmers can’t raise oranges and grapefruits and kumquats and figs and sweet potatoes. Markets that want those things must get them from Florida or California, where they belong. But—just as one illustration— there are lots of farmers in New London and Windham counties who could raise pigs, good pigs, fat and sassy pigs, weighing from 225 to 235 pounds each. And right in Norwich, easily ac- cessible from almost all parts of the two counties, is a packing house, using, to supply the meat-caters of the two counties alone, an average of 200 such pigs a week Yet that packing house has to buy its pigs in Chicago to furnish the roasts and the sansages and the mess-pork of our two counties, because it cannot buy the pigs at home. It would rather buy them right here, at Chicago prices, if it could get them of the right weight 1 the right quality of meat. But it can't. Last year it was able thus to buy only one single small lot. This lot was a fine one; “they were dandy pigs,” but when it was gone there were no others between Rhode Island and the river, from Massachusetts to the Sound, that would fill the bill. This packing house wants about 233-pounders, because the mar- kets it supplies won't take the meat irom heavier swine. Also, it requires grain-fed pork because of its lesser shrinkage. The one local lot bought last vear fulfilled both these conditions, showing that such pork can be raised in New London county. Now, lots of us farmers want to raise “big hogs.” When one goes to stretching out and filling up, with every promise of making a 300- or 4oo-pounder, we can’t bear to nip him off at 235 pounds. \We keep on stu him. Well, I’ve got no per- sonal objection to a iour-hundred-pound hog, with side pork three inches thick and ribs long enough to make fence-posts of. Ii I'm going to raise a hog to eat myseli, it's all right for me to keep him till he's as big as an ox. But if Um raising him to sell, that's another question. 11 the buver doesn’t agree with my opinion abont the relativé desirability of big hogs and little hogs, it isn't my province as seller of pork to try to reform him, but of 360 acres, for les oy to find out what he wants most and will pay most for and give him that sort of a squealer. lt's simply the guestion whether T'm raising pork for ten cents a pound, or for the sake of beating Bill Smith and bragging over him. 1 don’t mean to say that all the farmers of New London and Windham counties could raise pork of any sort at a profit. Some men are not built for pig growers. Just as some couldn’t make money out of hens or cows or sheep or potatoes. But there are others who could raise pigs for this Norwich market. That sin- gle packing house, using over 10,000 hogs a year of an average weight of 235 pounds, and paying an average of 10 ts a pound for them, must have sent out of the county, to Chicago, more than $250,000 last year for pigs most of which might have been raised within twenty-five miles of its abattoir. That’s a very tidy sum of money. It would have helped everybody concerned if it could have been kept at home, to circulate where it be- longed. If it had been paid out to local farmers it would have chirked them up amazingly, would have helped every retail and wholesale merchant in two counties, would have been felt coin- fortably in every factory, would have strengthened every bank. But now that Chicago has clutched it, how much of it will Con- necticut ever see again? A man with one cow can raise one pig rather cheaply. 1 know of one farmer, over in Eastern New York, who has two hundred cows and raises every year two hundred pigs at a good profit. He feeds, during the warm weather, bran, middlings, or ground rye, in skim-milk, to keep the pigs growing.” Then, when the first cool weather comes, he shades off his ration. gradually, into corn-meal, till, when it has become really cold, he is feeding meal exclusively and freely. His market allows him a leeway between 200 and 250 pounds. His average feed-bill per animal for hogs now being dressed, is 200 Ibs. bran 250 Ibs. corn-meal.... 3 3 Add $3.00 for the value of the 4-weeks-old pig—he raises his own, but that is what he could have sold them for had he not fattened them—and he has a 225-pound hog at a cost of $9.63, which he gets $22.50 for’ The skim-milk and butter-milk from his creamery which help make up the summer growing ration are wastes, i. e., would be absolutely wasted if not utilized in some such way. The labor involved every man can estimate for himself. If the farm- er, besides keeping cows, also raises his own corn, the actual cost of fattening the porkers may be still further reduced. A man makes a double profit when he charges his pig $1.40 a hun- Hred for the meal fed it, if he grows the corn himseli—a profit on both corn and pork. Two years ago N. H. Brewer, of Hockanum, won the n: tional prize for corn by growing 133 1-3 bushels of shelled corn— flint corn—on one acre. I don’t remember, now, whether he raised it at a profit or at a loss. Nor does it matter for what I'm thinking about. Brewer showed what could be done with common eight-rowed f corn on common old Connec t land in a common old Connecticut town. Pearley A. Davis, up in t Massachusetts, was another big prize-winner season. We haven’s been apt to think of th hills as being even with Ka and Tow Pt to corn-growing. But here’s one Connecticut farmer beati the whole United States in corn-production. Prof. L. A. Clin- ton of Storrs reports that the average crop per acre of shelled- Did you know that the twenty vears h: n corn in Connecticut is about 43 bushel average corn-crop of Kan 1 less than 22 bushel If Kansas is a “corn state,” with its average crop of 22 bushels, what"in heaven’s name would you call Connecticut, with its average crop of 43 bushels, and its ossible crop of 1337 The New York pig-man of whom I have spoken zbove rz his own corn, and reckons that it brings him a good deal more than $1.40 a hundred when he sells it pork. Th e sev- eral thousand acres between Waterford and Woodstock which will grow just as good corn as anything in Hockanum or Massa- chusetts. A good share of that quarter-million dollars is now blown out of the two counties every year on an easterly wind for Chicago ought to stay in them in return for the corn and pork which they might and should raise. % A GOOD SHEEP-GROWING COUNTRY. The Untillable Rocky and Brushy Pastures Will Produce Mut- ton and Wool. Pork is only one product which the markets of the two coun- ties call for and which the producers in them could supply but don’t. There are others. The dairy interests, including_milk and butter production, are perhaps as well developed as any of the strictly farm industries. But a good deal more might be done in the sheep line, wherever st dogs can be kept from ing the flocks. Much of the land of New London and Windham coun- ties is hilly, rocky, wooded or brushy. These areas, which are unplowable and which furnish but scant pasture for cows, are chosen banquet tables for sheep. The woolly creatures will leave good grass, any time, to chew at weeds or browse on bushes. Eliminating the one loss liable from vagrom dogs they are the easiest animals to raise we have; cost less, require less care, can be inclosed by cheaper fencing, are little liable to dis- ease, generally know how to take care of themselves—at least all through the summer and fall and farther into the winter than any other domestic animals. There is and always will be a de- mand for wool; there is and alw will be a demand for mut- ton and lamb. Even at the low prices which speculators offer— low in comparison with those charged by the butchers and the tailors—there is a profit to be had from the sales of mutton and wool, where the flock can be kept, most of the year, on otherwise waste scrub land. Moreover, a flock of sheep always pays the farm, every year, almost as much, in other ways, as they pay the farmer in money for wool, etc. The manure which they make in their sheds, dur- ing winter, is easily worth double, load for load, any other ma- nure made on the farm. Not only has sheep manure a high- er value because of the plant-food in it, but that food is usually in more available form, is more easily accessible to the rootlets, and is better proportioned for promoting luxuriant growth. The manure which sheep leave during the summer and fall on their pastures is a constant enrichment to those otherwise unfertiliz- able hills. If any part of their pastures is weed- or brush-infest- ed, they are simply untiring vegetable scavengers and will clean it up into almost lawn-like neatness. If any parts of such an old sheep pasture can finally be plowed, they will generally yield, without any further manuring, superb crops of potatoes. Perhaps sheep-farming, alone and by itself, may hardly be suitable to Eastern Connecticut conditions, but there unques- tionably are scores of farms which now keep not a single baa-baa where, as a side issue, small flocks would more than pay for themselves in money and would build up the waste places into profitable acreages. A HEN AND DUCK COUNTRY. What Has Been Done May Be Done With Much Larger and Better Results. The agricultural papers are full of exaggerated and mislead- ing statements, in their news as well as their advertising col- umns, about the possible profits irom hens and other fowls. The enormous sums which some hen-fanciers make from the production of freak fowls and the sale of settings and young birds to crazy millionaires at fabulously exorbitant prices—these are not for common farmers. They are exceptions, in excep- tional cases. But, when all such have been eliminated, the fact remains that in every hundred farmers there are some hali-dozen or so who can get winter eggs out of their biddies. How they do it may be a mystery to the other eight dozen, but they do it, do it as a usual thing—and get mighty big prices for those eggs. It is probably true that a majority of fammers can’t get win- ter eggs at all: it is not unlikely that some who succeed spend more money to get em than the eggs would return at ten cents apiece; but there are born hen-men, who take to hens as a duck takes to water, and whom the hens take to and seem to be will- ing to work for. The farmer who is built that way is losing a good income if he doesn’t work along the line of his natural bent. Nearby markets are always calling on him for fresh eggs, or tender broilers, or dressed fowls. It is just another case where local producers might well supply local demands, keeping the money at home to increase local wealth. The records of Thanksgiving turkey contests for The Bul- letin prizes in the last few years are records for the turkey- growers of the two counties to be proud of. They show what can be done along that particular line. They indicate how much more could be done if farmers with suitable turkey pasture would reach out further into the field. Right over the line, in Rhode Island, duck-raising has been proven to be tremendously profitable, where the natural condi- tions are suitable. There is nothing in the imaginary line which separates the two states on the map to prohibit duck-raising along our own low shore lands. TROUT AND BEES. . Suggestions Which Promise Satisfactory Returns to Enterprise and Pluck: And how about trout—common brook trout? There are miles and miles of admirable trout-brook in both counties, scores of places specially adapted by nature for trout-ponds, ample law to protect the trout-preserver in his rights—and a demand for the fish which has never yet been fully satisfied and is not likely to be for many a long day. When one Rhode Island hatchery is able to produce and ‘sell a ton a day from April to July first, at the average price of sixty cents a pound, doesn’t it look as if those Eastern Connecticut land-owners who have or can easily make trout-brooks and ponds, might at least get enough money out of them for the missionary box? Bees, too; look at the constant, urgent demand for fine honey. In these days of Italian bees, there is much less risk and discomfort in caring for them than when old-fashioned hives were used, filled with old-fashioned buzzers, all armed with old- fashioned stings which they were ready to flesh on any occasion —or mno occasion at all. It may not always be possible to sell potatoes or pumpkins at a good price, if everybody else has a big crop, but there isn’'t any immediate danger of the honey business being pushed beyond or even up to the calls of the markets—the local, nearby, right-at-hand markets SMALL-FRUIT GROWING. Little “Bays” the Lord Made for Red Raspberries. Now and then there comes a year when everybody’s straw- berries take a spurt and the crop gluts the market. But this doesn’t happen often. As a rule there is a bigger local demand for good berries than there is local supply. The deficit has to be made good by calling in poorer and staler berries from other states. Even when these latter are in full supply, there is always a demand, at better prices, for strictly fresh, first-quality “na- tives.” The same applies to raspberries and blackberries. There e hundreds of little “ba along the hills of New London and Windham counties which the Lord made on purpose to grow red raspberries in—big, long, glowing, mulberry-sized, sweet and uniquely-flavored red raspberries. And whoever heard of a case where there was an over-supply of these? There may be mes when eggs are a drug on the market and nobody will buy ‘Well, the market which could potatoes, but red raspberries? supply all the red raspberries its customers want would be a rarity, indeed. There may not be “millions in it” for berry- growers, but there are a good many dollars, allee-samee. GARDEN TRUCKING. Tomatoes and Onions Give Satisfactory Returns. There is room, too, for a much-needed development of the garden industry. Last summer it was almost impossible, at times, to get a good tomato anywhere at any price. We have accustomed ourselves to letting Long Island and New Jersey pply us, and when their crops failed we were “in the soup”— and it wasn't tomato-soup, either. Yet tomato-growing is no more difficult than potato-growing. A big tomato-raiser near New York city once said to the writer that he would much rather raise tomatoes at 50 cents a bushel than potatoes at the same price. Of course, it is necessary to learn how; they are not successfully grown just the same way as potatoes. But land which will bear a good crop of one will usually bear a good crop of the other, and, taking one year with another, and con- sidering the very good prices which early tomatoes usually bring when offered, fresh, plump, and redly-ripened at a nearby market, they average a good deal more, per bushel, than pota- toes. Onions: there must be plenty of land as suitable to onion- raising along the eastern edge of the state as near Wethersfield or in Fairfield county. One reason why so little is done with them is the scarcity of help. It is universally assumed that it takes a lot of work to care for an onion-bed and farmers who can't get help enough to tend their large field cropsiproperly, are not to be blamed if they laugh at the idea of raising onions at a profit. But there are several ways to skin a cat and more than one way to raise onions. Take the case of A. O. Gilbertson of Mitchell county, Iowa, for example. Thirty-three years ago he began to raise onions in the old-fashioned way, and they cost him an average of 35 cents a bushel to raise, principally due to the cost of thinning and weeding. Now he raises forty acres every year, his average crop for the last ten years having been 24,000 bushels, selling for an average price of about 63 cents per bushel—or $15,000 for the crop—and it costs him only g cents a bushel to grow them, though he pays his laborers $2 a day wages, the season through. He prepares his land by pre- vious fallowing and persistent tillage, till he has killed out the worst weeds. He plows under all the humus he can make the plow cover, subsoils, fits the forty acres till every square foot is periectly mellow and perfectly fined and periectly smooth, then puts on 400 pounds of weed-free fertilizer and sows his seed. e doesn’t drill in six pounds to the acre at $2 a pound, and then have to thin out five-sxths of the young onions. He has made an onion-seeder for himself, which drops just one seed and no more every two inches in the row. Where it used to cost him from $25 to $40 an acre merely to thin the bed, since he has used this seeder it hasn’t cost him a cent, nor has he had any failure to grow continuous rows. Now, there are farmers in New London and Windham counties who know just as much about soils and crops, and who are -just as brightly inventive Yankees as any rancher out in Iowa. 1f he can raise onions with $2 a day labor, by using his own brains, at a cost of 9 cents per bushel, it ought to be possible for those with suitable land in Connecticut, where acres and fertilizer are both cheaper and labor is no higher, to raise them at a like cost. As to price—while this Towa man gets 65 cents, the writer of this has, within a month, had offered him at a wholesale commission house in a Massachusetts city white onions “from Connecticut” at $1.80 per bushel basket—and the basket wasn't full at that, and wouldn’t have held a full bushel if it had been! ORCHARD MAKING. How Other Fruits and Small Fruits Promote Development. Fruit has been alluded to., While the raising of berries and smilar small fruits may seem more like gardening than farm- ing, true orchardizing permits the use of big lots of land and wholesale methods of work. Today various Oregon apple di tricts, like Hood River, are selling fancy apples in eastern mar- kets, over the heads of local orchard-owners, though they have to pay 50 cents a bushel freight on every bushel they send as far as New York city. Their orchards sell for {from $1.500 to $2,000 an acre! All through Western New York are orchard farms whose owners average a gross income of $400 an acre from them. Up in Vermont, one 100-acre Greening orchard this past fall produced 5,000 barrels of fancy fruit, so good as to sell at $4 a barrel. The owner was offered $50,000 in cash jor his hundred acres, including the crop, but refused to sell because it was worth more. Over in Seymour, Hale’s 350 acres of or developed from $10 to $25-an-acre land, are now said to be worth at least $250 an acre, and capable of paying big interest on four times that sum. Yet there are no lands in Oregon or New York or Vermont or Colorado or New Haven county, better adapted to raising fine apples than the hillsides of New London and Windham counties. There are tens of thousands of acres in these two counties which the owners couldn’t sell today for $15 an acre which, in the hands of practical orchardists, might be be made worth twenty times that sum in a dozen or fifteen years. There aren’t apples enough raised in Connecticut to begin to supply its markets; not enough raised in New London and Windham counties to supply a single city in one of them. Fruit dealers in all the larger towns send to New York to get most of their apples and like fruits. But for its fine fruit the local market must depend on New York or Oregon or Vermont or some other distant supply. The chances are strong that any young farmer, starting now an orchard of fair size, of the right sort of trees, and caring for it as he would care for his corn or potato crop, will, in less than twenty years, find himself in regular reeeipt of 2 handsome in- come. If he has an old orchard to begin with, he can expect some return a good deal sooner than that. When one old Wind- ham county apple orchard, forty years old, neglected for twenty years, having had decent care for only eight years, can produce at the New England fruit show a $50 barrel of Northern Spys, it looks as though there might be “something doing” if only other farmers would wake up. Nor need the fruit grower wait for his apple trees to bear before lie takes any income from the orchard. If he sets his ap- ples at least thirty feet apart—iforty would be better—he can set rows of plum and peach and pear and other short-lived trees be- tween them, these latter to be removed when the apple trees grow big enough to need all the roo: Even further, dusing the four or five years while these “filler” trees are getting ready to bear , he may put between them rows of berry bushes to bear in two or three years, and, still in the vacant spaces left by even these, strawberry plants to bear the first and second year. It is thus possible to make land produce strawberries while the blackberry and raspberry vines are growing, raspberries and blackberries and dewberries and gooseberries and currants while the plum trees are getting ready, plums and peaches and pears and grapes while the apple trees are maturing. Says the Wind- ham county man who raised those $50 Spys: “I believe that a well-cared for orchard will paya better profit on capital invested than anything off the farm.” But where one of us sees this and acts upon it, nine hundred and ninety-nine of us just roll over and go to snoring again. Why not wake up? FIVE TONS OF HAY TO ACRE. ‘What Clark of Higganum Did, Others May Do. fn a state where for a score of years Clark of Higganum demonstrated the possibility of raising five-tons-to-the-acre hay at a big profit, it is surely regrettable that any farmers should still be satisfied with a yield of a ton or ton-and-a—half to the acre. There are farms in Eastern Connecticut where three tons or more are regularly cut to the acre. Likewise, there are farms where you’d have to put extra teeth into the old horse-rake to scrape up a ton on three acres. Perhaps there aren’t many of this last sort; there certainly aren’t many of the three-tons-to- the-acre sort. Yet, on New England land naturally adapted te grass-growing, three tons to the acre ought to be regarded as the smallest crop permissible. What Clark did at Higganum om land not naturally intended for mowing, ought to be and is pos- sible for farmers with natural grass-land. Of course there is a limit to the demand for what you might call gold-plated hay, such as Clark grew, at fancy prices such as he used to get. But good, clean timothy hay, with or without red-top, but with ne weeds and no clover, will always sell for more than the rubbish mixture of daisies and golden-rod and charlock and “]nnem-c’ and sedge which is raised on too many farms to swin the stomachs of long-suffering cows with. New London and Wind- ham counties ought now to be not only producing all the hay consumed within their limits, but experting it by the trainload for sale to the pernickety horsemen of the big cities. AN AGRICULTURAL REGION. What We Go Abroad For Can Be Grown at Home. Almost every crop known to the agriculture of the temper- ate zone can be raised, profitably, in some or all the towns of New London and Windham counties. There is a big and grows- ing market right in the two counties for a vast deal more than beef; to Long Island and New Jersey for our v New York and Oregon for our apple to California and the Genesee valley for our honey; and so on and on, when we might produce all those things in our own fields and on our own hills, sell to them in our own markets and keep the money in our own pockets or invest it in our own manufactures or put it in our own banks. Of New London county are mainly agricultural. Practically all the towns of Windham county are of that character. Of the 630,000 acr n the two counties, it is safe to say that 500,000 at least are available for agricultural purposes. That is leaving out 130,000 acres for the cities and villages, the rivers and hopeless swamps, the bare rocks and the acres wasted under old-fashioned fences. It does not exclude the forested areas, for good farming regards its forests as a crop and makes them pay. Suppose that each of these 500,000 acres yielded produce worth only $10 an acre. There are hundreds of thousands of acres in Great Britain, acres which have been worked for two thousand years and which some might think were “worn out” before Columbus iled from Palos, which tenants bid against each other in their eagerness to get at a yearly rental of per acre. Suppose our 500,000 ilable acres yielded, in gross, only double that amount, $10 per acre. This would mean an annual agricultural business of $5,000,000 in these two counties. The Bulletin’s resume of Norwich’s man- ufactures for 1907 shows that only one line, cotton manuiactur- ing, equalled that sum. It is a greater aggregate than the total business done by the jobbing-houses of Norwich in packing- house products, groceries, tobacco, dry goods, clothing, liquors, drugs and chemicals, fruits, produce, butter, cheese and eggs, hardware, confectionery, housefurnishings, fish and oysters—all combined. It is doubtful if there is any business in the two counties which today offers better inducements than farming, intelli- gently conducted. It isn’t fair to compare the achievements of some hard-working, brains-using man in the city with the fail- ures of some inefficient, brains-neglecting man in the country. Work counts in both pla and brains count in both—for more than mere work, too. ake the two together—plenty of ’em both, well mixed and kept well shaken up, and they will, ordi- narily, count for fully as much on the farm as behind the counter or desk. It’s time we farmers woke up to the chances which we have and set to work making the most of them. One good way to begin is to find out what the markets of Norwich and New TLondon and Willimantic and Putnam and Danielson and Jewett City and a score of other cities and vil- lages want which they now have to send away for; what sort of things they want; what grades they want; what amounts, and in- what sort of packages. Then find out what the old farm wants to grow or can be made to grow, of these demanded products. Then grow 'emi. And sell 'em. 1t’s astonishing how much easier it is to sell 2 man what he wants than it is to sel him ‘what he doesn’t want just because you'd like to get rid of it @