How We Farm in Hickman County 

At first let me say we are not model farmers.  I think we are just beginning to realize there is something in "book farming." Some of us take the agricultural papers for the advice the advice and the benefits we get from taking it. Some of us take them for the advice they give and the pleasures we get from laughing at it, and some of us do not take any papers at all in the agricultural line.  A few of us are rotating our crops and finding them to bear stock and returning the manure to the land though we do not use the manure spreader yet, thus making our land more productive every year, building good fences which make them look better and adds to their value.  Some of us rotate our crops and sell our corn and hay which keeps our land producing more than it did ten years ago would be decreasing if we did not have an abundance of phosphate. The clover in the rotation furnishes us nitrogen.

A good portion of us only plan a year ahead, do not rotate our crops systematically, follow corn with corn until it will not grow, then build it up with peanuts until they will hardly sprout.  Then at last, turn it to rest.

We are getting fewer every year, though, and we are the ones that take none or laugh at the agricultural papers we do take.  If we happen to get transportation to the annual “Farmers Convention” for our division of the state, we go to Nashville and to the convention only long enough to get our pass counter signed.  But, some of us are changing, some dying, and others going to Texas.  There will be only a few of us soon.

One of our leading weeklies had an article not long since on "What shall we eat in the future?" which made interesting reading proving that the coming generation will have rice three times a day with our staple foodstuffs as a luxury only for the will to do.

I don’t think such a time will come.  Right here in our own state, county or district there is enough land lying idle to furnish a good living for money more than we now have, and the acres we have in cultivation will by scientific management more than double the amount they now produce.

We are going to get our corn in late this spring.  We have had an abundance of rain.  It is raining as I write.  Our land has been too wet to work for three weeks now.  Our streams have been such that we would not cross except at the bridges, though we have not had a big gusher as yet that sometimes does so much damage to our bottoms.  Wheat, oats, and clover are looking well, and I see no reason why we will not have a good crop even if we get our corn in late.