RE: It is easier to make money in the market!
I hold with Jefferson that "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts
He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."
My farm neighbors in Cumberland County, IL are among the poorest people I know, but persons of virtue and worth. My next neighbor, a man of 73 (at the time 20 years ago, now alas dead), told me when his wife died "She was just beginning to enjoy some of the good things of life, and she had to die. We've lived all of our lives on (soy) beans, and never eaten meat." He had 20 acres of sorry land (we're South of the Wisconsinin terminal moraine (the glacier which brought such fertility to Central Illinois)) and a tarpaper shack. His young grandson told me his favorite subject at school was "lunch." He cut down the old, twisted white oaks in my woods for his own firewood (he had no woodlot) and insisted on paying me $2 for each tree. His daughter and her crippled (veteran) husband collected and shelled hickory nuts to sell to whoever buys hickory nuts. He was bent double, so the labor of picking up the nuts was not especially burdensome. They paid me (over my initial refusal) $5 a year for the mast rights to my farm. They wouldn't touch charity or welfare. I taught her how the Cherokee made pow-hiccorah (nut soup) from hickory nuts (an old family recipe originally cooked, believe it or not, in a birchbark kettle). The cattle on my farm browsed secure and undisturbed next to this family, neither eating the other.
I'll tell you some time about my farm policy. I think you'll
like it.
Hugh |
