—1877—Rules For MakingA Husband Happy

#77

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Rules For Making a Husband Happy

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—Show that you are anxious to avoid waste, and to be faithful in your department of labor.

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—Do not neglect neatness of person and surroundings.
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—Never speak slightingly or bitterly of or to your husband, especially in the presence of other people.

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—When your feelings have been hurt, do not allow your thoughts to dwell upon the injury, but resolutely banish it from your mind, and do some kindness in return. 
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—Speak gently always, and do not allow your voice to become sharp and loud. Control of the voice helps to control the temper.
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—Try to do not only what your husband wishes in household matters, but also when and how he wishes.
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[Thomas’s Farmer's Almanac]

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 Rules For Making a Wife Happy

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—1857—Ten Fixed Factsin Agriculture

#76

(photo link)

1.  

All permanent improvement of lands must look to lime as its basis.

2.  

No lands can be preserved in a state of fertility unless clover and the grasses are cultivated in the course of rotation.

3. 

Mould is indispensable in every soil, and a healthy supply can alone be preserved through the cultivation of clover and grasses, the turning in of green crops, or by the application of composts rich in the elements of mould.

4.  

To manure or lime wet lands, is to throw manure, lime, and labor away.

5.  

Periodical applications of ashes tend to keep up the integrity of soils, by supplying most, if not all, of the organic substances.

6.  

Abundant crops cannot be grown for a succession of years unless care be taken to provide an equivalent for the substances carried off the land in the products grown thereon.

7.  

All stiff clays are benefitted by fall and winter ploughings; but should never be ploughed when wet.

8.  

To preserve meadows in their productiveness, it is necessary to harrow them every second autumn, apply top-dressing, and roll them up.

9.  

Deep ploughing greatly improves the productive powers of every variety of soil that is not wet.

10.  

All highly concentrated animal manures are increased in value, and their benefits prolonged, by admixture with plaster, salt, or with pulverized charcoal. 

[Thomas’s Farmer's Almanac]

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—1874—The Interest Money

#74

A Farmer & His Banker (note the difference in waistline girth between the two men)

My friends, I wish to give you my ideas of the interest money which so many of you are paying while you are spending time and money in many ways in foolishness, swapping horses, expensive living, and loafing. 

There is no blister draws sharper than interest. Of all industries none is comparable to that of interest. It works all day and night, in fair weather and foul. It has no sound in its footsteps but travels fast. It gnaws at a man’s substance with invisible teeth. It binds industry with its webs. Debts roll a man over and over, binding hand and foot and letting him hang upon the fatal mesh until the long-legged interest devours him. 

There is but one thing on a farm like it, and that is the Canada thistle, which swarms every time you break its roots, whose blossoms are prolific and every the father of a  million seeds. Every leaf is an awl, every bristle a spear, and every plant like a platoon of bayonets, and a field of them like an armed host. The whole plant is a torment and a vegetable curse. And yet a farmer had better make his bed on Canada thistles than attempt to be at ease upon interest.
[Maine Farmer's Almanac]

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Attitudes about "Interest money" were changing in the 1800's, when the Agrarian Nation was declining and the Industrial Nation was ascending. 

As the factories cranked out more and more new stuff that people never knew they needed before, these people (who became known as "consumers"), needed a way to afford what they could not really afford. So "easy" credit and personal debt increased. 

Today we have come to the point that debt, credit and interest money is the lifeblood of the industrial system.

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I think it is interesting to note that interest on money was once referred to as usury and it was not an acceptable practice, as explained in this excerpt from the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary:

The practice of requiring in repayment of money lent anything more than the amount lent, was formerly thought to be a great moral wrong, and the greater, the more was taken. Now it is not deemed more wrong to take pay for the use of money than for the use of a house, or a horse, or any other property. But the lingering influence of the former opinion, together with the fact that the nature of money makes it easier for the lender to oppress the borrower, has caused nearly all Christian nations to fix by law the rate of compensation for the use of money.

So it was that the definition of usury changed to mean excessive interest or illegal interest. This change of meaning happened over the course of hundreds of years (long before 1874). If you have an interest in this subject of interest, read This Essay on Usury at the Economic History Association web site.

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For another historical perspective on "interest money" and usury, consider Dante's, The Inferno, written in the 1300's. Dante places usurers (understood at that time as anyone who loaned money at interest) in the third ring of the seventh circle of hell, which, in Dante's hierarchy, is below (worse than) violent murderers.

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Eric Sloane Speaking AboutThe Agrarian Nation

#73

Maple Sugaring, by Eric Sloane

Today I present to you four short excerpts from the book, American Yesterday, by Eric Sloane, first published in 1956.

For those of you who don't already know, Eric Sloane was an artist who authored and illustrated numerous books, most of which were about the American Agrarian Nation. As you might guess, I'm a big fan of this man's work, and have been since my teen years. I suspect that what I learned from Eric Sloane's books helped to shape and sharpen my early agrarian understandings, which have eventually led to the creation of this web site.

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It takes a thousand men to get a load of fuel oil from the raw material to your furnace and probably as many to deliver a load of coal. It takes only one man, however, to make a pile of cordwood. Unlike a mess of oil or a heap of coal, a stack of wood is a living and a gladdening thing to behold. It has long been the symbol of the double benefits of farm life, warming you twice—once when you cut it, another when you burn it. Actually there is a third warming which is hard to define; an old almanac says, ‘City homes are warmed by coal, but country hearths do warm the soul.’

Summer in Vermont, by Eric Sloane

Whether you were a banker or shoemaker in colonial times, you were always at the same time a farmer; whether your home was large or small, it was also a farmstead. Even princes and poets of the eighteenth century were ardent agriculturists or posed as farmers and rural philosophers. Not having a rural background and a farming philosophy in those times was perhaps as bad as not being a church member.

We think of George Washington as being a “gentleman farmer,” which now describes a hobbyist, but Mount Vernon followed the tradition of all homes of that time. The General had the exact knowledge of farming that every American enjoyed as part of his daily life. How strange and foreign to modern living is a notation from the diary of John Adams: “Rose at sunrise, unpitched a load of hay and translated two more ‘Leaves of Justinian.’”

Farming now is an occupational pursuit. Farmers raise stock to sell, but two centuries ago they farmed almost entirely for themselves. Instead of a pursuit, farming was then a way of life. The philosophy of farming, which was once a recognized American principle, was based on three beliefs.

1. That agriculture is the fundamental employment of man upon which all other economic activities are vitally dependent.

2. That the farmer enjoys economic independence.

3. That farm life is the natural life and, being natural, is therefore good (This belief implies that [a] completely [urban or metropolitan] life is necessarily a corrupt one).

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If you would like to read more about Eric Sloane I recommend a 2007 essay I wrote titled, The Christian-Agrarian "Awareness" of Eric Sloane.

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—1875—Connecticut Farming

#72

Large farms are almost unknown in Connecticut, and the average-sized farm, which is not far from a hundred acres, is decreasing with every decade. If the welfare of society is considered, this tendency is not to be regretted.

Very large estates, thoroughly improved and worked mainly for economical results, employ a large force of laborers, content to sell their labor, and never looking forward to the possession of homes of their own. [But] our democratic institutions encourage every man to covet the possession of land for himself. As soon as he becomes intelligent and skillful, and makes himself profitable to his employer, he discovers that he can make his own labor pay better on his own land than on that of his neighbor; hence he improves the first opportunity to buy a few acres, or a run-down farm, and starts in business for himself. 

This thirst for land, which runs in the blood of every Yankee, and which infects almost every European very soon after he lands upon our shores, operates very steadily against farming upon a large scale. The large land-holder finds it very difficult to secure good help at reasonable prices, and still more difficult to keep first-class workmen after he gets them. In a very few years they want to set up for themselves.

This is a very good thing for society, which wants the largest number of intelligent, prosperous freeholders, but not so good for the capitalist, who wants a thousand acres and twenty laborers the year round to furnish the sinews for his brain and purse.

So we find in this commonwealth a great division of the soil among a multitude of cultivators, and almost every variety of farming that is possible upon a small territory.

[The Cultivator & Country Gentleman—April 29, 1875]

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In the Agrarian Nation of 1875 it was understood that a large number of intelligent, prosperous freeholders was "a very good thing for society."  That is to say, that having a majority of citizens living on their own small sections of land, and working to derive the bulk of their subsistence from their land, is a very good thing for society. 

That pretty much defines what an Agrarian Nation is.
Though America has changed with the sweep of industrialism, the wisdom of this old excerpt is as sound as it ever was.

Which reminds me... if you have not yet read my NY Times editorial, titled The Jeffersonian Solution, please do so.
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—1875—Castrating Rams

#70

(photo link)

I noticed an inquiry a few weeks since as to the best time to castrate rams. My experience runs through fifty years. I have seen them castrated at all seasons of the year, with success in proportion to the heat or cold of the weather at the time of the operation. The colder the day the better. I once castrated an old ram when the thermometer was at 40° below zero; and an hour after and until healed, he paid no attention to it. In the operation I press the testes down, and cut the slit near the lower end, so that no blood can find lodgment; and just large enough to get the testis out; I then cut away the ligaments as usually done, and then draw the main cord out carefully, so as to pull it as far out as possible; the longer the cord is drawn out, the less bleeding. As I pull I wind it around my fingers and draw till it breaks. I never cut or tie the cord, and there is seldom more bleeding than just from the cutting of the skin. I never lost one in my life.  —Peter M. Gideon
[The Cultivator & Country Gentleman / Vol. XL—No. 1155]

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Peter M. Gideon's method for castrating a ram lamb will surely work (who can argue with 50 years experience) but it so happens that a lot of sheep ranchers don't try to grasp the slippery testes with their hands—they use their teeth instead. 

The following video illustrates this technique very well.

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Some readers might wonder why ram lambs need to be castrated. It is because the meat and the attitude of an uncastrated ram is not very good. Only a few (or one, depending on the size of the flock) "fully functional" rams are needed for breeding purposes.

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There is another way of "emasculating" a ram lamb. It involves a tight rubber band that is stretched around the animal's scrotum. The band restricts blood flow, and the whole scrotum eventually falls off. Tails are docked in the same manner.

I listened to an online speech by Mike Rowe, star of the above film clip, in which he explained that he went to the ranch in that episode of "Dirty Jobs" with the belief that they were going to castrate using the bands. He was shocked when he got there and the farmer was pulling the testes out with his teeth.

The farmer said he had some bands and they could use them. But it was evident to Rowe that the banded rams were under duress for some time after the banding, while the rams that were cut went off and were happily grazing on pasture. As bloody and unsavory as it was, Mike Rowe came to the conclusion that castrating and docking tails with a knife was more humane treatment of the animals.

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