fiber.

fiber.

The important thing is to be patient with her, to forego quick immediate returns—for better ones later. It’s something like saving your money, investing it, and getting it back three, four, or even fivefold, in a very few years.

That is how I feel about my own farm. And so I have adopted and am following as many conservation practices as I can: Crop rotation, field cover, manuring, liming, fertilizing, pasture improvement, etc.

The faster I get these practices going, the sooner my goal will be reached, I know, but I'm not trying to do it all at once. I don’t believe in being in too big a hurry.

Like any other science or art that deals with real life, conservation is a growing knowledge. We learn by doing. And we learn still better ways of doing. I want to stay in touch with conservation as it develops further, and take full advantage.

So I’m doing about one field a year but doing that field ‘well. Maybe when I get around to the last field, several years from now, conservation men will have some suggestions even better than those offered today.

If it’s a hay field, maybe there’ll be a better strain of alfalfa, or a better grass than orchard; if it’s pasture, maybe there’ll be an improved Ladino. You never can tell. But I’m not going to sit back and wait; J’m going ahead, field after field, year after year. There’s only one promised land worth waiting and dying for.

But there is a promised land worth living for, and working toward. And for me conservation holds the key.

Many city people think (I guess I should have said assume; they really don’t think, in this case) that all farmers,, working farmers, are either too busy or too dumb to enjoy the outdoor pleasures that their land offers, like swimming, picnicing, hunting, fishing, bird-watching, or even walking. They’ll have to think twice in my case. I’ve already built my farm pond; and I’m going to see to it that I have the leisure time for fishing and everything else, too— through conservation.