WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A FARMER

KW CARTER, MAINE TIMES 1974 - It will take a third of a lifetime for a
man to learn the many and diverse skills necessary to enable him to
survive while producing beef, potatoes, milk or what have you. He
will, when he has attained competence as a farmer become expert in all
of the following fields plus a great many others which I have not
mentioned.

He will have a working knowledge of plant and animal nutrition.

He will be an efficient rough carpenter,

He will be a competent lumberman and woodsman.

He will be a veterinarian of sorts. ,

He will have the skills of a mediocre housepainter and electrician.

He will .have a working knowledge of many kinds of machinery and be a
more or less skillful mechanic.

He will know how to dig a well, wall up a spring, lay a .waterpipe and
do some rough plumbing,

He will ,learn how to predict the weather with greater accuracy than the
U.S. [Weather] Bureau or he will be in deep trouble.

He must have some knowledge of accounting or the government will nail
him to the cross the first time he makes any money

He must know how to build a barbed wire fence, corduroy a road through
the swamp, butcher a hog, salt his sowbelly and raise his beans; how to
deliver a cow of her calf, how deep to plant his beet and spinach seed,
build a scarecrow to keep the crows out of the com, and shoot the foxes,
racoons and squirrels that eat his poultry and raid his garden; he will
learn to hang an axe, file a saw, shingle the barn, install lightning
rods, repair the mowing machine, cure cannibal- ism among the chickens,
and make a brine to cure his ham and bacon. He must learn to handle a
dangerous bull or get gored in the process.

He must be capable of conning his banker out of a loan when things are
taught, which they certainly will be; and he will learn [guile] when
dealing with those who buy his produce or they will skin him alive and
nail his hide on his own barn door.

This is perhaps ten percent of the skills he must learn to survive, None
of them require any enormous intellectual capacity, but he will be years
learning them the hard way.

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||