The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette., August 31, 1912, Image 1

About The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette. (Starkville, Miss.) 1910-1920

Image provided by: Mississippi Department of Archives and History

                
MIMM WA®M ©AglfFFEI
A Farm and Home Weekly for
Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee.
I_B BIRMINGHAM, ALA.,—MKMPHIS, TENN.
i-Vol. XXVII. No. 35. SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 1912. Weekly j $1 a Year.
LOOKING BACKWARD—AND FORWARD. i
WE liad occasion the other day to go back
through our last year’s volume of The
Progressive Farmer and—all modesty
aside—we found some very interesting things
in it. We, of course, found a lot of things
which did not please us; it was easy to see how
I the paper could have been changed for the better
in many ways. In fact, we never turn out an
issue without seeing, after it is done, where
I it could have been improved. For all that,
however, we decided—just between ourselves
A —that The Progressive Farmer last year was a
11) pretty practical, helpful sort of paper, and that
// it had in it some things still worth remembering.
For example, we found as a sub-head in an
article by Mr. A. L. French this sentence: “The
! best boss is the man who can do the job him
I self.” We should like to commend this idea
to many of our friends who have trouble with
their labor. We can abuse the Negro until we,
too, get black in the face, and it will not make
a good farm hand of him; but when the white
farmers of the South themselves learn how
to do well any sort of work on the farm, and get in the
habit of doing it that way, they will find the Negro following right
along and doing it pretty much as they do. We have no patience
with the idea that the Negro connot be trained to handle machinery
or to care for livestock, for he can. He does not know how now, as
a rule, simply because he has not been taught.
j • • *
On another page we found a letter telling how the farmer who
wrote it progressed from a Boy Dixie to the sulky plow and riding
cultivators. He said that we helped him do it and that made us feel
good, of course; but the special value of his letter is the answer it
; I gives to those who think that when a farm paper tells about anything
beyond the present reach of the very small farmer it is doing nothing
to h dp him. Why, bless you, the first step toward improvement is
to wish for something you don’t have and can’t get right now; the
second step is to find out how you can get it.
* * *
Another thing we found which is worth recalling and repeating
was this sentence in a letter from Mr. R. B. Sullivan: “Take care of
your soil, and your annual income will take care of itself.” We might
hunt all day and we couldn’t find a terser expression of the one great,
fundamental fact Southern farmers need constantly to keep in mind.
If we could only get every Progressive Farmer reader thoroughly
convinced of this fact, these old fields of ours would blossom like
the rose within the next ten years.
This sentence illustrates what we have said before—that the very
best things in the paper come from the men right out on the farm. A
farm paper made up of letters from its readers and without any defi
r nite editorial policy to guide it in the selection of those letters, is
bound to be a poor excuse for a real paper; but, on the other hand, the
editor who imagines that he can dispense with the first-hand contri
butions from the men in the furrows, will soon find himself getting
out of touch with the soil and the people who till it.
VIEW ON FARM OF MR. CLARENDON DAVIS. 1
Read on patre 5. the story of what Mr. Davis has done 1
We are proud of our readers, but—just between ourselves again—
we reached up and patted ourselves on the head when we read in
one of the March issues that the oniy way to secure profitable prices
for cotton and to insure satisfactory returns for the year's labor,
would be to put cotton in its proper place as one of the crops in a care
fully planned rotation and to get rid of the idea that any one crop
could be the whole thing. What we predicted then about the excessive
planting of cotton came true; and it will come true again unless,
as we then advised, the farmers of the South get down to sure
enough business farming and begin rotating their crops with an eye
not only to present profits but also to the future welfare of the
soil. And there will never be a better time for them to make a
start in this line than this very fall.
FEATURES OF THIS ISSUE.
A HOME-MADE WHEEL-TRAY—A Simple but Useful Device_ 9
CLARENDON DAVIS AND HIS WORK—An Alabama Farmer Who
is Doing Things Worth While. 5
COMMENTS ON RECENT ISSUES—Thoughts Suggested t<» Pro
fessor Massey by Recent Articles. *1
HOW-TO LAY OUT THE GROUNDS AND MAKE A LAWN—The
Second of Mr. Niven’s Articles on Attractive Farm Homes. ... tl
HOW TO SHOCK CORN—Views of a Practical Farmer. 17
PRACTICAL INFORMATION ABOUT OATS—The First of a Series
of Articles on This Oop. :i
TAKING CARE OF LITTLE CHILDREN—How England is Con- i
serving the Future . II i
TENANTS ANT) LANDLORDS—A Page of Free Discussion. 15
THE NEGRO IN SOUTH AFRICA AND IN AMERICA—By Booker
T. Washington. 18
UNCLE CORNPATCH ON THE STOVEWOOD QUESTION—How
the Wife Can (Jet a Woodshed . 8 j
WHY FARMERS NEED THE STOCK-LAW—Letters From Our
Readers . 1:1
WHO IS A PROGRESSIVE FARMER?—The Farmer Who is Pro
gressing, of Course . 10