Excerpt from The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil It is not strange that there are persons mak ing a living from the land who are not farmers. Consider that in former time it was the natural state for most men to live on the land. It is recorded that more than ninety per cent of the people in the United States were rural in the first census, 1790. These occupants represented all kinds of people. For one hundred years we have been in the process of removing people from the land: other means of liveli hood have been available; industrial pursuits have needed the recruits; the producing-power of the farmer has greatly increased. This proc ess of removal has proceeded without conscious direction and there has been no adequate policy for utilization of lands left more or less vacant. The results have been haphazard and unequal. We have not yet sufficiently sifted and sorted the farming populations. We are still in the shift. Moreover, many persons have taken to the land who by training and temperament are out of place. Plowing the land and raising a crop is not farming. The feeding of a lot of live-stock is not husbandry. Farming is a system, one that the farmer works out for himself to suit his land, his climate and location, and his tastes; it connects all the years into a program. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.