12
Jul

Day is Too Short For The Farmer

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The Fort Dodge Messenger: July 12, 1904

Day is Too Short For The Farmer

He is Working From Dawn Until Dark and Still Has Plenty to Do.

Prospects Are All Smiling

Haying Season is Now At Its Height – Cutting of Small Grain to Follow and Then Comes the General Harvest – Corn Doing Well.

The haying season is now at its height and some of the early pieces of oats are most ready to cut. With the past few pleasant days the farmer has raised his hopes several notches and is buckling into the work with renewed zest. From now until after the shock threshing season is over he will be as full of business as an electric belt fakir on a street corner.

Now he is riding the mower and rake from morning until night. Enormous stacks of hay are rising as if by magic in the meadows, and the great barn lofts are being crammed until they groan with their burden of sweet smelling new-mown hay. Following close upon the heels of the haying season will come the cutting of the small grain. Some of the early “Fourth of July” oats will be due to cut the first of the week and about seven days later the real general harvest will commence and from that time on until the last of August every farmer in the country will be on the jump from “sun up” till dark and still be wishing he might have the service of Joshua in order that he command the sun to stand still until he could get “that last load in.”

The cold wet weather of a few days ago was not just the kind required to ripen the grain rapidly, and there was a little tendency toward rust, but generally the grain was little damaged, and with the present warm dry weather it is coming on very rapidly, and there is no fault to be found with the progress it is making.

Corn, too, the past few days is fairly jumping out of the ground. When the nights are warm and the air feels stuffy, then is when the corn crop gets up and humps itself. Nearly all of the corn in the county is now pretty large to plow and most of the fields are ready to lay by.

(Editor’s note: An electric belt fakir seems to be someone selling electric belts – or a substitute – for some medical purpose. But the connotation is that the people selling are charlatans or scammers.)

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