My father was a progressive farmer, and was always ready to lay aside an old plough if he could replace it with one better constructed for its work. All through life, I have ever been ready to buy a better plough.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My dad farmed, my granddad was a farmer. I wanted to be a farmer.
My father was a prosperous hatter-farmer - making hats for the local markets during the winter months, tilling his little ten-acre farm during the summer time.
We've got nine generations of farmers in my family, in Warwickshire. And I do feel connected to being a farmer's son. There was a time when I didn't, when I rebelled against it, but there's certainly that sort of work ethic within me.
My father was trained as a saddler, but in fact as a young man worked in his father's business of rearing and selling cattle, so he grew up in the countryside.
It brings up happy old days when I was only a farmer and not an agriculturist.
Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.
I would supplant the ox with the automobile and pave instead of plowing the fields. 1 have a theory that if a corn field were paved, leaving out a brick for each hill, it would increase the yield, do away entirely with the mud, and give the farmer plenty of time to meditate on lofty subjects. That is only one theory. I have many others.
I loved to get all dusty and ride horses and plant potatoes and cotton.
Whether some may like it or not, I am still the farmer that I was born as and will continue to be one.
As a Midlander and a big walker, I'd always loved ridge and furrow fields, the plough-marked land as it was when it was enclosed. It is the landscape giving you a story of lives that ended with the arrival of sheep.