Page 253 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

ACK in the eighteen-nineties, the sight of a young man driving his horse and
buggy along the lonely country roads became a familiar one to the farmers of
southwestern Iowa. His name was Henry Field, and on the buggy seat beside
him rested a basket of seed packets which he sold from farm to farm in the
country and from house to house in the small towns and villages. He had
planted, raised and prepared that seed in his own garden. He had even printed
his own seed packets, and after he had filled them he went out himself to sell
them. His was strictly a one-man business.

There weren’t any large towns down in southwestern Iowa in those days.
There weren’t any surfaced roads, and sometimes there weren’t any roads at
all. He had to cut across fields to reach some of the farmers who bought his
seed. But whether the temperature was 110 in the shade or down below zero,
whether the roads were heavy with dust or hub-deep with mud, Henry Field
was on the job. He brought more than seed to the isolated farms he called on;
he brought helpful suggestions about planting, news about what other farmers
were doing, information about the need for good seed in getting good crops.
But most of all he brought friendliness and encouragement. The farmers and
their families got to know him and to like him. They looked forward with
eagerness to his visits. They talked about him with their neighbors.

Before long these customers wanted to buy more of Henry Field’s seed than
he alone could raise and deliver. He thought he was well enough acquainted
with his customers to get their orders by mail just as well as in person. That
would permit him to devote his full time to producing and shipping the seed.
So he got hold of some second-hand printing equipment in Shenandoah,
Iowa, printed a modest catalog, and started a mail-order business.

The Knack of Appealing to Farmers

Through years of personal dealings with them, he knew how to appeal to
farmers as successfully by the written word as by the spoken word. First of
all, he must make his story brief and to the point. As he himself once
expressed it: “When you’re driving along the road on a freezing day and meet
a farmer taking a load of corn to market, you can’t make him stop and shiver
all day while you’re talking to him. You have to tell him your business in just