THOUGH intelligent soil improvement is the most profitable business
in which an honest man can engage, ordinary farming is not a highly
remunerative occupation, and to a large extent the fortune of the
farmer is bound up with the increase or depreciation in the market
value of his land. There are at least three important factors of
influence which induce people to continue farming:

First, the farmer is his own employer. He controls his own job, is
his own boss and has no superior officer to lay him off because of
disagreement, dull business or political preferment. Farmers
constitute by far the largest class of citizens who own their own
business, and are thus "independent."

Second, the farmer is able as a rule to make some sort of a living
for his family very largely out of the produce of the farm, so that
he gets some return for his labor in terms of food, even when there
is no profit in farming as a business; whereas the wage-earner of
the city, as soon as his wages stop and his savings and credit are
exhausted, must see his family supported by charity or starve. This
is not fiction, but fact.

Third, land is usually considered a safe investment, in which one
may hold a perfect and undivided title to his property; and people
will retain possession of a farm even when it pays a low rate of
interest, rather than sell and invest the proceeds in some other
enterprise which they cannot control as individuals or which may
suddenly depreciate in earning power, fail or be utterly destroyed.

Is Land a Safe Investment?