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a i ee
ition
rus Me We

THE TRAINING
OF FARMERS

THE TRAINING
OF FARMERS

BY

L. H. BAILEY

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1909

Copyright, 1909, by
L. H. BAILEY

Published October, 1909

248834

ANALYSIS

PAGE
THE NATURE OF THE PREOBLEM) 2.4020. (5.6
The schools and colleges—The indigenous forces
—Individualism—Not an ‘‘uplift.’’

THE INSUFFICIENCIES IN COUNTRY LIFE . 15
The better country life—Striking insufficiencies.

PART I
THE MEANS OF TRAINING FARMERS

(Pages 21-82)

eres GEV REIN MERI epic g aes oats et) es ahve

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF STATE GOVERN-
MENT AND OF PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS. . 29
i Pablice demonstration farms.) o's 2S). 28
2. Inventories of rural resources... Pam
3. Attitude toward the farmer in eeitaine a tae teed

THE READING HABIT. .. . 37

Rural literature—Need of cir wats = Sh: li-
braries—The world outlook.

Vv

ANALYSIS

PAGE
HEALTH CONDITIONS IN THE OPEN
COP a ans PA ie et pee
1. Some of the specific ‘haath Aotieounen are a

Physical training—Long hours—Cleanness—
Good air—Ignorance of disease— Diet— Waters

and wastes—Sanitary houses—Highways—
Rural diseases.

2. Some of the remedies for health conditions. . 60

New kind of dwelling—Inspections—Attitude

of societies—Farm laborer—The school—Su-
pervision.

GSE Ws fT he 6 1 Ra ; - 68
The farm home is a Lambebanre The Ape ak s
fatalism—The community should prove up—
The country church—Y. M. C. A.

FEDERATION OF RURAL FORCES ..... 79

PART IT

THE SCHOOL AND THE COLLEGE IN
RELATION TO FARM TRAINING

(Pages 83-262)

WHY DO THE BOYS LEAVE THE FARM?. . 89
Character of the problem—An inquiry of students
—Letters from those who have left—Questions
raised by the replies.

ANALYSIS

PAGE
WHY SOME BOYS AND GIRLS TAKE TO
REM Eet 5)) 3) (So! pide reel eh fuse) | pithe OBES
1. City to country. . . 4 Pali tee 3 Se
The nature of the miplids—- What the lofers
say.
2. Courttry to country. .. . 123

Replies from farm stindeiea Waeaey Bice
farm-bred students..
sepaeaies (COMIC RRC SF SN a a a TOE ana ag eee

THE COMMON SCHOOLS AND FARMING .. . 137

Responsibility of the school— Educational values.

1. The question of the equivalency of studies. . 140
The older order—The newer order.

2. The nature of the forthcoming school . . . 148
The four R’s—Agriculture in the schools—
School to represent the community—The
high-school— Process of evolution.

3. A school man’s outlook to the rural school. . 158

4. The need of a recognized system . . . . 166
Schools and departments in colleges and uni-
versities—In normal schools—Separate schools
of agriculture—In secondary schools—Rela-
tion of the whole.

THE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND THE
aes | VOETARES, | sires sila abe | SURG ee
1. Opinions of students .. . 3 . 173
The students and their voppkices Catenin! on
the replies.

2. What is to become of the educated farm
AIEEE yy <a as agra Way Con Har Honey Ree Stel 3 /2e8

ANALYSIS
PAGE

The part played by the college—The part
played by the farm—Back to the farm—
Should all the students become farmers?

3. The summary 5). 2050.' eee
COLLEGE MEN AS FARM MANAGERS... .195
1. The problems involved. . . . . 196
Outlook of students on the question elesaneaiee®
replies— Winter-course students— Managers are
not ‘‘hired men.’’
2. Can farming pay such salaries?. . . . . 206
The economic question—The farm itself an
a responsibility —The reconstructive movement.
3. How shall the inexperienced coilege man
* seeure'a farm training? )..) . 4)! (a) /-\ ee
Be RO VPOW his!) sf Joa a Ue)! Nese a! |) S56) ee

THE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND THE
ot Gi by oc: bw eet ey

Obligation on te oat of the people: Diseneds
kinds of colleges of agriculture.

. Scope of a highly ee college of agri-

culture. «.< . 226
Three great Hinicas of mieten Gee aA lie.
stock— Particular examples of crops and live-
stock (grass, live-stock, forests, an acre of
water) — Household subjects—The mechanical
side—Engineering questions—Farm architec-
ture—The landscape—Farm management—
The human problems—Training teachers—
The outside or extension work—Kinds of ex-
tension work—Lectures and traveling teach-
ers— Teaching on farms—Local leaders.

2.' Lhe Work IS UPOR US... <> 4. 00) te at

viii

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

THE TRAINING OF
FARMERS

The so-called rural problem is one of
the great public questions of the day. It
is the problem of how to develop a rural
civilization that is permanently satisfying
and worthy of the best desires. It is a com-
plex problem, for it involves the whole
question of making the farms profitable
(that is, of improving farming methods),
perfecting the business or trade relations
of farming people, and developing an ac-
tive and efficient social structure.

As the problem is complex, so there is no
simple or easy solution. The present status
is, of course, a phase or stage in social evo-
lution; and the improvement of the condi-
tion must be a process of further evolution.

3

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

The existing condition is not inherently bad
or ineffective, as a whole; but in some of its
aspects it is relatively inefficient and un-
developed as compared with the best urban
conditions. It is not because the rural
status may be less or more efficient than
city conditions, however, that I am inter-
ested in it, but rather because it is not what
it is capable of becoming, and is therefore
in need of improvement.

The rural problem is being attacked on
many sides by very many persons. In this
book, I speak of only one phase of the prob-
lem,—the means of training the farmer
himself, both as a craftsman and as a citi-
zen. From the point of view of the college
and school [ have contributed several ar-
ticles on the subject to The Century Mag-
azine. With these articles, I have now
incorporated others that discuss the same
general subject, together with much new
writing, so that the whole may comprise a
homogeneous statement. I hope that these
contributions may have more value rather
than less from the fact that they have been
separate studies, made at long enough in-

4

THE RURAL PROBLEM

tervals so that the conclusions have had
time to season. I have discussed some of
these questions in ‘‘The State and the
Farmer’’; but in the present book I bring
the subjects together for the purpose of
showing some of the means now in exis-
tence whereby farmers may be trained.
The future will develop other means; I am
here speaking of what it is possible and
practicable to do in the present state of so-
ciety.

{
Tre NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

F the betterment of rural ie,

a process of evolution, then all persons
who are to be concerned in the evolution
must take active part in it if they are to
enjoy the benefits of the progress; and I
like to think that each person will enjoy
these benefits in about the proportion that
he actively participates in the work of re-
construction. That is to say, we all bear a
natural responsibility, as citizens, to for-
ward the rural status as well as the urban
status; and this responsibility rests spe-
cially on all those who are near the problem
or are a part of it. The countryman must
not be one of a recipient or receptive class,
but he must himself promptly help and co-
operate to solve the rural problems and to
discharge his full obligations to society.
This is in large part the theme of the book.
Even a farm is not a private business in

6

THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

the sense that it should be absolved of re-
sponsibility to society and be outside all
regulations in the interest of society.

The schools and colleges

Schools, colleges, experiment stations,
departments and bureaus devoted to agri-
culture and country life are now many and
they are increasing. They mark a distinct
advance in the application of knowledge
and teaching to the plain daily problems of
the people. They are rapidly becoming the
best expressions of the social responsibility
of government. Their work is free of cost
to individuals; and in this fact lies a dan-
ger, now becoming real, that their benefits
will be accepted as a matter of course and
of right, and that the individual will not
contribute in return as much as he is under
obligation to contribute or as will make the
help that he receives of real value to him;
for I assume that when a person receives
personal help and encouragement from so-
ciety (or government) he contracts an ob-
ligation to aid society and his fellow man.
The institutions will render the best service

7

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

when they help persons to help themselves
and when they stimulate active local initia-
tive on the part of those with whom they
deal or work.

The indigenous forces

If the countryman is to be trained to the
greatest advantage, it will not be enough
merely to bring in things from the outside
and present them to him. Farming is a
local business. The farmer stands on the
land. In a highly developed society, he
does not sell his farm and move on as soon
as fertility is in part exhausted. This
being true, he must be reached in terms of
his environment. He should be developed
natively from his own standpoint and
work; and all schools, all libraries, and or-
ganizations of whatever kind that would
give the most help to the man on the land
must begin with this point of view.

I will illustrate this by speaking of the
current country movement to revive sports
and games. More games and recreation
are needed in the country as much as in
the city. In fact, there may be greater

8

THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

need of them in the country than else-
where. The tendency seems to be just
now, however, to introduce old folk-games.
We must remember that folk-games such
as we are likely to introduce have been de-
veloped in other countries and in other
times. They represent the life of other peo-
ples. To a large extent they are love-mak-
ing games. They are not adapted in most
cases to our climate. To introduce them is
merely to bring in another exotic factor
and to develop a species of theatricals.

I would rather use good games that have
come directly out of the land. Or if new
games are wanted I should like to try to in-
vent them, having in mind the real needs of
a community. I suspect that suggestions
of many good sports can be found in the
open country, that might be capable of
eonsiderable extension and development,
and be made a means not only of relaxation
but of real education. We need a broad
constructive development of rural recrea-
tion, but it should be evolved out of rural
conditions and not transplanted from the
city.

9

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Individualism

We are gradually evolving into a social
conception of government, by which I mean
that the inherent rights and welfare of all
the citizens are to be recognized and safe-
guarded and that the whole body of citi-
zens shall work together cooperatively for
these common ends. Privilege and oppor-
tunity belong to every man, according to
his ability and deserts. It is a common
misapprehension that this gradually ap-
proaching social stage will eliminate indi-
vidualism and that its methods will con-
stitute a leveling process; but individual-
ism and social solidarity are not at all
antipodal.

Individuality and personality are much
to be desired, and we are under obligation
to see that they are not lost in our pro-
gressing civilization. The farmer is the
individualist. His isolation, and his owner-
ship of land and of tools, make him so. He
may lose his individualism when he at-
tempts to dispose of his product, but he
nevertheless retains his feeling of individ-

10

THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

uality and independence throughout life.
He may even resent any inquiry into his
welfare by government, even though it is
apparent that the sole purpose of the in-
quiry is to aid him. We need to preserve
and even encourage the spirit of independ-
ence, at the same time that we forward the
social cohesion and working together of
farmers on all points of mutual or collec-
tive interest. The educational and other
institutions should help to do these two
things,—to assist the farmer to rely on
himself and to be resourceful, and to en-
courage him to work with other farmers
for the purpose of increasing the profit-
ableness of farming and of developing a
good social life in rural communities.

Not an ‘‘uplift’’

It will be seen at once that this is not at
all a question of ‘‘uplift,’’ as this word is
commonly understood. The rural ques-
tion is broadly a problem of stimulation,
redirection, and reconstruction.

Nor is it, therefore, merely a problem
of technical agriculture as an occupation,

11

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

although, of course, the whole rural con-
dition rests on the agricultural condition.
All citizenship must rest ultimately on oc-
cupation, for all good citizens must be
workers of one kind or another, and there
must be no parasitic class. The question
directly concerns all persons who live in
rural communities, whatever their occupa-
tion, and it concerns them in all their rela-
tions,—in relations to church, school, co-
operation, organization, to politics and all
public improvement, and in the general
outlook on life and the attitude toward all
matters that affect the general welfare.

It is not a problem merely of the thinly
settled farming regions, but of the entire
country outside distinctly urban influences,
comprising hamlets, villages, and even
small cities that sit in an agricultural
region and are controlled by agricultural
sentiment. To designate this extra-urban
realm I have used, for several years, the
term ‘‘the open country,’’ and this has
now become current in this semi-technical
or special signification.

Considered as a whole, the people

12

THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

of the open country have not yet
arrived at a conception of a thoroughly
social or codperative society. The farm-
ing people have been obliged—and are
still obliged—to give too great a pro-
portion of their thought and energy
merely to making a living. They have not
entered on the social phase and they
searcely know what it means. They are
tied to the daily routine both because they
have not learned how to organize and con-
duct an agricultural business effectively,
and because they are preyed upon and sub-
jugated by interests that control distribu-
tion, exchange, and markets and that divert
or exploit the common resources of the
earth.

The farmer must be aided in his busi-
ness of farming, and the artificial hin-
drances that are not a part of this business
must be removed or checked by govern-
ment; then he must be made to feel that he
is to give of his time and talent to the com-
munity. In the largest sense, no person is
a good citizen, whether in country or town,
who merely has good character and is pas-

13

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

sively inoffensive and is a ‘‘good neigh-
bor.’? He must be actively interested in
the public welfare, and be willing to put
himself under the guidance of a good local
leader, if he does not himself attain to
leadership.

14

¥ a

ad

a ee
-
i

Tuer INSUFFICIENCIES IN Country LiFe

FEW months ago I attended a meet-

ing in one of the best parts of the
eorn-belt, that was called for the purpose of
discussing the condition of country life
in that region. The first testimony of
those who spoke was uniformly to the ef-
fect that farm life in that part of the world
was all that could be desired. AJll farmers
who had given any worthy attention to
their business were prosperous, farms were
paid for, the men had the best of turnouts
and some of them had automobiles, and
many of them not only had money in the
bank but were bank directors or concerned
in other important business enterprises.
The farmers were not complaining, and
town people considered farm land to be a
good investment. In fact, the farmers
were so prosperous that they were able to
move to town at fifty years of age.

15

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

I asked why they desired to move to
town. The answer was, to secure good
school facilities, to escape bad roads and
isolation, to have church privileges and to
be able to enjoy social advantages. In other
words, the country life of the region was
successful only on its business side, and a
satisfying rural society had not developed.
The town was the center of interest. The
country was not sufficient unto itself as a
permanent place of abode.

The better country life

What I mean by a better country life is
a rural civilization that meets the needs of
the twentieth century, and that is able to
hold the center of one’s interest through-
out life. Primarily, it must be profitable
in money; but it is not a good civilization
until it develops good social and educa-
tional institutions of its own, directly from
the resident or native forces, and until it
appeals both to youth and old age because
of its intrinsic attractiveness and advan-
tages. <A civilization of this kind will be
the country life of tomorrow.

16

THE INSUFFICIENCIES

Striking insufficienctes

The most apparent deficiencies are lack
of effective rural institutions, as of really
live and progressive social organizations,
churches and schools; but all these are of
course dependent on the earning-power of
the farmer; and this earning-power is con-
ditioned on the freedom and fairness with
which the farmer may conduct his busi-
ness, aS compared with other men. The
middleman system needs to be overhauled
and the abuses removed. This ought to
come about through the operation of a
public-service commission or similar body.
Foreign markets should be opened. The
inequalities of taxation should be evened
up. The discriminations in transporta-
tion rates and regulations must be cor-
rected by the constant oversight of some
competent authority. Parcels posts and
postal savings banks must be provided. A
useful system of agricultural credit and
banking needs to be worked out. Injus-
tices in general legislation that bear spe-
cially heavily on the farmer need to be cor-
rected. Monopolistic control of streams,

2 1G

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

forests, lands, and other resources must be
regulated. Good highways and other means
of communication are to be provided.
Sanitary conditions are to be studied and
supervision provided for public health in
the open country. Intemperance must be
reduced. The labor and immigration prob-
lems as they affect agriculture are in great
need of thorough study. The woman’s
part in farm life must be redirected. The
scenery attractiveness of the farming coun-
try should be appreciated, and the land-
scape features preserved and improved.
A new rural architecture must be devel-
oped. There is the greatest necessity for
a more fundamental, accurate, and under-
standable knowledge of the processes of
farming, to the end that a perfectly ra-
tional agriculture may be developed. The
countryman of the future must be trained
for his work.

I am not to be understood as saying that
all these shortcomings characterize all agri-
cultural regions. In some country com-
munities, they are not marked; but, on the
whole, the rural social structure is unde-

18

THE INSUFFICIENCIES

veloped, and even some of the most pros-
perous or profitable agricultural regions
are the most barren of social and intellec-
tual resources.

How to bring about reconstructive ends
is now the problem; but it is certain that
the essentials of the problem are these:
(1) better knowledge; (2) better educa-
tion; (3) better and completer organiza-
tion; (4) quickened social and spiritual
forces.

I shall now name some of the public
agencies that may help to bring about the
new order.

19

PART I

THE MEANS OF TRAINING
FARMERS

e

it oe 4
i ae
i i" oy

THe Means oF TRAINING F'ARMERS

The farm home itself is the most impor-
‘tant training place for farmers; but in this
book I am not considering personal and
domestic questions. The training of the
farmer must be largely in the hands of
government (or society), both because the
stimulation and direction of persons who
need stimulation must come from the out-
side, and because government can com-
mand the services of leaders and experts.
Government will not impart information
alone, but it will set up local organizations
and institutions to apply the information
and to set the people to work.

It is essential that government should
train farmers because this is the readiest
and most effective means, in the long run,
of saving our natural resources, and be-
cause the rural problem is in the best
sense a national problem and on its solu-
tion rests the permanent welfare of society.

23

THE .TRAINING OF FARMERS

As a means to these ends, government
should encourage all voluntary efforts
of the people of the communities. In
North America, the governmental activi-
ties have outrun the organized voluntary
activities. This is rather remarkable in
a country in which the theory of gov-
ernment has been to govern as little as
possible. Yet it should be explained that
- these governmental activities are not a
part of ‘‘government’’ in the narrow sense
of official procedure, control, and paternal-
ism, but are institutions of public better-
ment maintained by the people.

The most direct means of training
farmers is through the schools and col-
leges of various kinds. There are many
other means, however, although they may
not be recognized as such; I propose now
(in Part I) to enumerate enough of these
to explain what I mean, and then to pass
(in Part II) to a fuller discussion of regu-
lar educational agencies.

I shall not enter into any argument to
show that it is necessary to train farmers.
I presume that there is no disagreement on

24

MEANS OF TRAINING FARMERS

this point. I assume that farmers, as other
men, must be trained if they are to be
effective workers in the world. From the
point of view of society, it is essential that
farmers be trained in order that the
fertility of the land—on which the exis-
tence of mankind depends—shall be safe-
guarded. Other interests have been the
beneficiaries of protection and_ special
privilege; the training that the farmer re-
ceives is calculated to develop the man him-
self rather than to succor and shield his
business.

25

RuraL GOVERNMENT

HE American system of government is

theoretically a process of self-educa-
tion. All rural government should produce
improved conditions of living in country
communities. Unfortunately, parts of it
have fallen into the hands of men who seek
mere personal advantage, and to that ex-
tent the system has been deflected from an
organism to. serve and develop the people
into one that serves to place men in power ;
it has to this degree ceased to be educa-
tional, and therefore has missed its func-
tion.

The subversion of government is spe-
cially marked in many rural communities,
where local incentive is often so completely
stifled by machinery, domination and cus-
tom that the community is unable to work
out any real improvement in its condition.
There is a general lack of any fundamental

26

RURAL GOVERNMENT

or structural plan to improve the neigh-
borhood in a broad or effective way. The
county board of supervisors, or equivalent
group, for example, is not usually a body
that is much concerned with any large plans
for the development of the county as a
whole; each supervisor is likely to be chiefly
concerned to force down the expenses in his
own township and to put the cost of im-
provements off on somebody else. This
spirit runs through rural government. In
most cases, such government is dead, as
compared with what it might be.

We hear much of boss rule and of graft
in municipal politics, but it is probable
that the difficulty is as great in rural poli-
tics in proportion to the population, to the
opportunities, and to the stakes that are
involved.

The whole country status should be
brightened up and loosened up, with new
life put into it. I doubt whether this can
come about until we evolve different pro-
cesses in government of rural communities.
We may even need new schemes of govern-
ment in these communities. I am not at

27

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

all sure that the schemes now chiefly in
vogue are such as are designed to develop
a new structure of society or to encourage
the best leadership; they certainly have
not proved themselves. We are beginning
to study municipal government; we are in
equal need of a fundamental reconsidera-
tion of the way in which rural communities
may be governed. To this subject I hope
to return at some future time.

28

Tue RESPONSIBILITY OF STATE GOVERNMENT
AND oF Pustic INsTITUTIONS

MODERN government not only ad-
ministers and executes, but it devel-
ops the business and the welfare of society.
There is an educational side to government
that we will recognize more clearly as time
goes on. Public institutions bear a respon-
sibility to the community aside from exe-
cuting their own plans or performing their
legal functions. I will first illustrate this
by speaking of the idle farms belonging to
the public or semi-public institutions. Now
that we are beginning to recognize the
very great importance of ‘‘demonstration
farms’’ as means of teaching the best agri-
cultural practice, the state or institutional
farms assume a new significance.

1. PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION FARMS

The United States Department of Agri-
culture, experiment stations, and agri-
é 29

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

cultural colleges are beginning to estab-
lish demonstration farms to teach the
people in the localities. Every public in-
stitution that owns a farm should contrib-
ute to this movement. There are prison
farms, asylum farms, almshouse farms,
and other land properties, comprising
many thousands of acres and located in all
parts of the states, that might be local
teaching agents. It is not enough that
public farms of this kind be merely well
farmed (some of them do not even meet
this requirement); they should all be
demonstration areas, at least in part, to
exhibit and explain to the communities the
newer and better facts of agriculture. They
should have some kind of relation with a
supervising educational institution, and
their work should be broadly organized on
an educational basis.

We need to go still farther than this.
There are thousands of good acres of land
in the states, located directly in the centers
of the best communities, that are used only
one week each year and even then perhaps
with little effect on the betterment of coun-

30

RESPONSIBILITY OF GOVERNMENT

try life. These properties belong to the
fairs. It is apparent that here is also an
enormous property and opportunity that
might be made of direct and continuing
use to the people of the communities. It:
would be possible in many cases to grow .
experimental crops on certain parts of the
fair grounds, to be standing in exhibition
when the fair meets; or if not that, cer-
tainly the entire grounds could contribute
to the public good fifty weeks in the year if
they were carefully laid out with trees and —
shrubs and kept open as exhibition parks.
All of them could in this way become test
grounds and recreation grounds. They
should be tied up to the idea of public bet- |
terment. And the fair itself should be so
directed as to be an educational enter-
prise: there is no other reason for holding
a fair. No country-life institutions are so
expensive for the length of time that they |
are in service for the public as the fairs.
We may look for the time when the fairs
themselves will be more continuous, with
educational exhibitions given at intervals
throughout the year when their effect will
31

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

be greatest. All exhibits should be ex-
plained by a good teacher. .

An inquiry in an eastern state (not yet
complete) shows that at least 156 public in-
stitutions have farms, aggregating more
than 25,000 acres, and only three of the
institutions are conducting agricultural
experiments. Of semi-public institutions,
twenty-one have farms, with more than
2,500 acres, but no experiments are con-
ducted. Two of the institutions that make
experiments are poor-farms or almshouses
and one is a state school. Of the sixty-two
fairs reporting, none conducts tests or ex-
periments on the grounds.

2. INVENTORIES OF RURAL RESOURCES

The government of the state has a larger
responsibility to the country problem than
merely to turn over the rural institutions to
the general good. It must set constructive
forces in motion. It must develop the busi-
ness and welfare of country life.

32

RESPONSIBILITY OF GOVERNMENT

We must know exactly what our re-
sources are. We are accustomed to geo-
logical surveys and to censuses to count
the voters and make apportionment of
voting districts. We inventory our min-
eral resources. But we have no accurate
knowledge of the soils in the different
localities, of local climate, the wealth of
localities in the way of woodlots and small
streams, the feasibility of developing small
industries in the communities (and the
open country needs new industries and new
interests), no good studies of local mar-
kets or of the kinds of agriculture that it
would be best to encourage in any section.

The central experiment station or col-
lege engages in the discovery of principles,
but it may not be able to apply them in
other parts of the state, because it has no
specifications of conditions in these parts.
Neither has the farmer himself any ade-
quate concept of the conditions, because no
one has given him the knowledge and no
one has it to give. We are now passing
the stage of exploitation in agriculture.
We are rapidly coming to a time when spe-

? 33

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

cial skill must develop on our farms. This
skill is, of course, conditioned on local
knowledge. The greatest fundamental need
in country life is a thorough-going survey
in detail of our agricultural resources.
Something is being done in this direction
by the colleges of agriculture, but it is
pitiably small when compared with the
needs. Within such a survey scheme should
be included, as component parts, all soil
surveys, orchard surveys, live-stock and
dairy surveys, and whatever other system-
atic studies are made of the products, in-
dustries, people, and institutions of the
localities. All this geographical know-
ledge should be mapped and platted.

An agricultural survey of national scope
should be set on foot, with all the states
cooperating. The work should be nation-
alized under the United States Department
of Agriculture. A well-analyzed plan
should be made by a committee of com-
petent persons representing many regions
and many lines of study. The scheme hav-
ing been perfected, the work could proceed
systematically year after year, each state

34

RESPONSIBILITY OF GOVERNMENT

completing its own field as rapidly as it
chose. Certain phases or parts of the in-
vestigation could probably best be carried
by the national government. The im-
portant considerations are that the plan
shall be well studied, the work correlated,
and the movement progressive. It will be
only when we collect and compare such
data that we can hope to take the best steps
to establish a thoroughly sound country
life in the localities.

3. ATTITUDE TOWARD THE FARMER IN
LEGISLATION

| Because the farmers are not organized,
their interests are likely to suffer or to be
overlooked in the making of legislation. I
~ will illustrate what I mean by the game-
law legislation. No type of legislation
seems to be in a more hopeless or chaotic
condition than that relating to the pres-
ervation of small game. Laws are enacted
that apply to particular localities and not
35

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

to localities adjacent to them, or that please
a certain set of sportsmen, or that have
certain special interests in mind. Now,
small game is to a large extent a natural
product of farms. All game is a product
of the earth. So far as the earth is owned
for productive purposes, it is controlled by
the farmer. The general result of game-
law legislation and agitation is to antag-
onize the farmer against the sportsman,
whereas their interests ought to be har-
monized and unified. There must be funda-
mental principles on which such legislation
may rest, and these principles would neces-
sarily recognize that the farmer has rights
as well as the sportsman. Laws so made
would put the farmer and the sportsman
into sympathy and cause them to work to-
gether to the betterment of each.

The reader can extend this observation
to many other forms of legislation.

36

Tuer Reapine Hapit

HAT the farmer reads has great
influence on his training. The li-
braries carry a distinct obligation here,
particularly since traveling libraries and
rural libraries are being greatly extended.
To a large extent the effect of library work
is to cause persons to read for entertain-
ment. The countryman, however, needs to
read for courage, that he may overcome
his fatalism and inertia. Herein is where
library schemes are likely to be fundamen-
tally weak, if in fact not radically wrong
for the countryman. I would not eliminate
the natural desire of anybody to read for
entertainment; but I would make a special
effort to develop in the countryman a habit
of reading such things as will give him per-
sonal mastery over his conditions.

Rural literature
There is very little good literature that
is specially adapted to rural communities
37

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

except the technical agricultural books and
bulletins. It is often said that farm homes
are greatly lacking in books and in maga-
zines. This is often true. One reason is
that there is so little literature that is
really applicable to the farmer’s general
condition and also because his whole train-
ing -leads him to think in terms of experi-
ence rather than in terms of books. There
are many farm homes that are well sup-
plied with good literature, and the number
is rapidly increasing. In the old days one
would be likely to find a copy of ‘‘ Pilgrim’s
Progress,’’ the novels of Scott and Dickens,
a copy of ‘‘Robinson Crusoe’’ and other
books of the earlier order. The Bible is
found everywhere, but it is too often read
in the country, as in the city, from the point
of view of ‘‘texts’’ and not interpreted in
terms of present-day life. If I were mak-
ing out a set of books for reading any-
where, I should want to include some of
the modern expositions or adaptations of
biblical literature in order that the Scrip-
ture might be made applicable and vital to
the lives of the people.

38

READING HABIT

The novels have no special relation to
the actual conditions under which the
farmer lives. I would not advise that all
reading have relation to the life of the
present, but some of it certainly should be
applicable in order that it may have mean-
ing. We have very few good novels de-
picting the real farmer. A good many
farmer characters have been drawn, but
most. of them are caricatures, whether so
intended or not, and present a type of
life and a vocabulary which, if they exist
at all, are greatly the exception. Com-
mon novels are likely to be exotic. A good
part of them are read because they are the
best sellers of the time.

The bulletins of the experiment stations
and departments of agriculture are now
widely distributed; but they are not read as
much as they ought to be. This is in part
because the mailing lists are not selective,
and in part because the reader may have no
fundamental knowledge to enable him to
use them. In many cases the bulletins
themselves are unreadable and are only
reference texts. )

39

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

We have practically no good poems of
American farm life. A poem of the plow-
boy is very likely to be one that sees the
plow-boy from the highway rather than
one that expresses the real sentiment of
labor on the land: I do not know where
I ean find a dozen first-class poems of
farming. Farm poems usually are written
from the study outward, and by persons
who see farming at long range, or who come
to it with the city man’s point of view.

The nature books are largely forced and
lack personality. There are, of course,
distinct exceptions; but taking the books
as a whole my experience seems to justify
this judgment. We need native and sen-
sible books with country direction in them.
We need something like the Burroughs
mode applied to farm operations and farm
objects.

Of late the reportorial type of literature
has foreed itself into country-life subjects.
The reporter discovers a high point here
and there, does not understand relation-
ships, writes something that is efferves-
cent and entertaining and very likely mis-

40

READING HABIT

leading. The ‘‘wonders-of-science’’ idea
has also expressed itself in agricultural
writing, and we are beginning to produce
a type of literature that is unsafe. Some
person who is doing good quiet work in
the improving of crops, or in other agricul-
tural fields, is likely to be discovered by a
facile reporter, and his work may be made
to appear as a sensation.

We have no history of farm life or farm
people. I have recently been much im-
pressed with this lack, when I have been
trying to find biographical data of a great
many persons who have had much influence
in developing good country life in North
America. The careers of these persons
do not appear in our standard biographies,
although persons who may have accom-
plished much less may be included. The
result is that no ideal of leadership in
agricultural or country-life affairs is
put before the boy or girl. The biogra-
phies that the youth reads are of persons
who have made their way in other careers.
Yet, as a matter of fact, scores of per-
sons whose names are unknown to the

41

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

standard books have exerted an influence
that is truly national in its character.
These persons should be listed among the
heroes to whose accomplishments the
young generation may aspire.

There are gilded publications that appeal
to city persons who have an extrinsic in-
terest in the country, or to those who have
abundant money to spend; but they exert
little, if any, influence on the development
of a native country life.

The agricultural press is now very exten-
sive and is contributing to the developing
of the reading habit, at the same time that
it spreads information and puts the reader
in touch with current topics.

We need a high-class journal of a new
type that will interest men sympathetically
and psychologically in farm life, devoting
only a secondary part of its space to the
smaller questions of technical farming.

Another mode of developing the reading
habit is by means of reading-courses and
reading-clubs, which are now beginning to
be organized by the agricultural colleges.
These are likely to have great influence in

42

READING HABIT

rural communities because (1) they are
directly related to the life of the people,
and (2) because they are dynamic or have
an active follow-up system.

Need of organization

Every social or educational organization
that exists in the open country should be a
means of developing and spreading the
reading habit. Local granges should be
reading centers. The farmers’ institutes
should leave behind them some kind of an
organization that will continue the work of
the institute and develop the reading habit.
All country churches, and all country
schools, should also be agents in the same
eause. All these organizations should be
made distributive centers for good litera-
ture. They should all aid in distributing
the bulletins of the experiment station of
that state. The local library will often be
able to distribute the experiment station
bulletins much more effectively than the
experiment station itself, because the
library should know the local needs and
the habits of life of its constituents.

43

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

We are much in need of a coordination
or association of all these various efforts.
If there is no formal organization as be-
tween them all, I am sure that there should
be a codperative interest between them so —
that they will all work together harmoni-
ously toward one end. All these agencies
should be active. They should know what
other agencies are doing. Each one of
them should preserve its full autonomy,
but it will do more concrete work if it
knows its own field, and will be stimulated
to greater effort if it knows what other or-
ganizations are doing.

The lhbraries

There should be a library in every rural
town. This library should have relation
to its community, as a school or a church
has. It should be an educational center.

The traveling libraries have provided a
new way of developing the reading habit in
the country and in remote towns. It un-
doubtedly has had great influence, although
I think that the character of its literature
needs to be reconsidered.

If libraries and librarians are only a

43

READING HABIT

means of distributing books, all that needs
to be done is to perfect the machinery or
the mechanics of the work. If they are to
energize the people and to redirect the cur-
rents of local civilization, they must do
very much more than this. They must in-
spire the reading habit, direct it, and then
satisfy it. We need not so much to know
_ just what kind of books to put in the hands
of readers as to establish a new purpose
in library effort. It is not enough to sat-
isfy the demands of readers: we must do
constructive work by creating new de-
mands.

The world outlook

Of course, I would not limit the country-
man’s view to his own environment. I
would begin with the things at home, as [
would begin to teach the child by means of
what is within its range; and then I would
lead out to the world activities. There is
every reason why a farmer should have as
broad a view of life and of the things that
le beyond as any other man has, but this
comes as a natural extension of his proper
education.

45

HeattH ConpDiTIONS IN THE OpEN CounTRY

N our approach to country-life ques-

tions, we have largely overlooked the
subject of the physical efficiency of country
people; yet here is a problem of funda-
mental importance, and attention to it by
all public agencies becomes at once a
powerful factor in education. The rural
districts cannot develop to their greatest
possibilities until every precaution is taken
to preserve the health of the resident in-
habitants. This is nowhere more marked
than in the necessity of controlling the
farm-labor supply. The excessive death
rate among children, which obtains in some
parts of the country, may be a direct cause
of scarcity of farm labor. We must also
develop strong and resistant bodies at
maturity in order that the real work of the
farm may be well accomplished. Public
health is one of our greatest natural re-
sources, aS important to conserve as iron,

46

‘ +
wens ee ee

HEALTH CONDITIONS

coal, or timber. No doubt our greatest
national loss and waste lies in disease and
reduced bodily efficiency of the citizens of
the Republic.

The sanitary condition of the open coun-
try is also of the greatest importance to
the city and the town. From the country
are derived water, milk, and nearly all the
food consumed in the cities. The condi-
tion of these supplies is of the greatest con-
sequence to every person living in an
urban community. As society becomes
better organized, every member of it bears
increasing responsibilities toward the other
members. Therefore there is a distinct
brotherhood responsibility on the part of
the country toward the healthfulness of
urban regions; and a no less reciprocal re-
sponsibility on the part of the city toward
the country.

I do not know whether the health condi-
tions of the country are worse than those
of the city; I make no comparison what-
ever as between rural and urban communi-
ties. I mean only to state what some of
the country conditions are.

47

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

1. SOME OF THE SPECIFIC HEALTH
DEFICIENCIES

I will mention some of the deficiencies of
public health in rural districts. In mak-
ing these remarks I do not have in mind
merely the question of disease. I wish to
consider the whole question broadly, to in-
clude the lack of physical efficiency in what-
ever way it may be expressed.

Physical training

There is a widespread lack of apprecia-
tion on the part of the farmer of the neces-
sity of good physical training. He is likely to
feel that because he leads an outdoor life
and has muscular exercise, he does not
need to give attention to physical develop-
ment. The fact is, however, that the
farmer is as much in need of ‘‘setting-up’’
as any other man. His routine work may
not contribute to the development of a well-
proportioned and strong physique. The
number of ill-formed, broken, lame and im-
perfectly developed men and women im-

48

HEALTH CONDITIONS

presses this fact. The modern riding ma-
_chinery has not contributed to the physical
development of the farmer. One has only
to note the posture of the man as he sits
on the plow,.the reaper, or the wagon-seat
to see that thisis true. He is likely to.take
the position of a horseshoe rather than to
sit upright with straight back and well-
carried shoulders. We need to give more
attention to the mode of construction of
seats on our farm machinery and vehicles.
The man who follows the plow is very likely
to fall into a loose and shambling gait,
with stooped shoulders and an unequal
poise of the body; the plow-handles are per-
haps too low to allow him to stand erect
and carry himself well. The lack of good
posture and good carriage (both of which
contribute greatly to physical efficiency) is
also marked in most housewives. They
have not learned how to stand or to walk
or even how to sit. Directors of gymnasia
find that country youth usually need a radi-
cal setting-up, even though they may have
strong muscles, clear complexions, and
robust health. If, in addition to these use-
a 49

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

ful native qualities, the young man or
young woman could acquire the proper
physical carriage and development, much
would be gained toward resisting the de-
mands of later life. The farmer is likely
to be careless of his body.

I do not know whether any careful sta-
tistics have been made comparing the
physical development of farm folk with
other folk. It is not unusual for persons
of good observation and in full sympathy
with rural conditions to say to me that the
physical health and development of farm
people is lower than of other people of
comparable position in life, although this
is contrary to the prevailing opinion. Itis
said that flattened chests, spinal curvature,
weak arches of the feet, and similar defi-
ciences, are marked in certain classes of
students coming largely from rural dis-
tricts. Itis a current saying that the isola-
tion drives many farm women insane; this,
I think, is an error. If it is true, it affords
the best possible argument for such an
educational program as will give the

50

HEALTH CONDITIONS

woman new interests in life; there is no
- doubt about the necessity of the program,
from every point of view.

Long hours

As a whole, the farm exacts too long
hours of work to enable the farmer and his
wife to develop the best physical resis-
tance. They become fagged; they have too
little time and strength to give to recrea-
tion, reading, and to intellectual pursuits
in general, thereby making life exclusively
physical. A shortening of the hours of
labor must come about through a general
reorganization of the farm scheme follow-
ing the gradual application of science and
business to the work of the farm. In some
of the best farming regions, a farmer’s
day does not now average more than about
nine and one half hours. Itis especially nec-
essary that woman’s work be so reorganized
that she will have time enough and strength
enough to enable her to take part in some of
the larger affairs of the community. There
is no one way whereby the farm work and

51

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

the housework can be reorganized, but the
reorganization must come as a matter of
necessity.

We are now making the mistake of
trying merely to improve the present order,
whereas we need to develop a new point of
view and to realize that all our systems and
modes of life must change in order that
they may be adapted to changing condi-
tions. At a time when there is a marked
tendency to shorten the hours of physical
toil and expand the intellectual opportuni-
ties, we cannot expect that the farmer will
be an exception, although his hours can
never be arbitrarily regulated.

Cleanness

Greater attention needs to be given to
common cleanliness. The whole question
of sanitation is said to be one of cleanness,
although this statement is too sweeping.
I have in mind not only bodily cleanliness,
but also the general appreciation of the
importance of tidy and well-kept surround-
ings. “This is fundamentally a question of
attitude toward life, but it also has very

o2

HEALTH CONDITIONS

distinct special bearing on the spread of
- disease. Whether in city or country, the
first essential to conditions of good health
is the elimination of all wastes, the destruc-
tion of all rubbish and refuse, and the free
use of water, soap, and disinfectants.

Many uncleanly personal habits must be
overcome and banished from rural com-
munities. In the remoter parts, these
habits are likely to persist. Perhaps noth-
ing has done more to challenge attention
to the essentials of cleanliness than the
recent agitation for ‘‘clean milk.’’ A man
eannot make clean milk without himself
being clean; and being clean of germs in
person and in barns, enforces a wholly
new conception of what cleanliness is. The
agitation against promiscuous expectora-
tion should be extended to the country dis-
tricts, not only for protection against
tuberculosis but to enforce standards of
decency. A sensitive civilization cannot
be developed in a spitting community.

o3

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Good air

There is still great need of emphasizing
the importance of fresh air. It is most
strange that persons who spend the day
in the open air are likely to bottle them-
selves up at night. I suppose that the
fear of fresh air is in part expressive of
our general philosophy of life, whereby we
unconsciously carry the idea that man is in
warfare with nature. We shut our doors
to nature. Our windows are small and
cramped, as if we only grudgingly let in the
out-of-doors. Before we knew the nature
of contagious disease, it was very natural
that we should consider the atmosphere to
be responsible for all kinds of insidious
enemies. Disease was supposed to be due
to some effluence or miasma, and we shut
our doors to it. Now that we are able to
distinguish the effects of air from mosqui-
toes, flies, and germs, we should begin to
discriminate in our habits. The best civili-
zation will come when we put ourselves in
sympathetic attitude toward nature, rather
than when we antagonize it; and we shall

54

HEALTH CONDITIONS

fearn what things are noxious and take
means to avoid them. ‘The spread of tu-
bereculosis in northern regions in former
time was due not so much to the fact that
winters were cold as to the battening up of
doors and windows. Sometime we shall
learn how to warm our houses and at the
same time supply them with clean air.

Ignorance of disease

There is still widespread ignorance of
the nature of contagious disease. There
are those who think that a swale or an
overflowed stream is in itself a source of
disease. The result is, in some parts of
the country, that there is too much visiting
in ease of contagious disease; or persons
may have a white fear of all sickness that
they cannot understand and thereby avoid
the sufferer and leave him without suffi-
cient care.

The lack of knowledge of the nature of
disease and the difficulty of securing a phy-
sician quickly, no doubt contribute largely
to the use of what are called patent medi-
eines. I would not condemn all proprie-

_

5

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

tary remedies; but it is really a marvelous
thing what faith we have in the label on
the bottle. It is a curious psychological
state. Without knowing what ails him or
what the bottle contains, if only the label
is reassuring, the man puts the contents
into his stomach. He asks no questions;
he takes no advice. I do not know of any
other habit that exhibits such supreme
faith; and the signs on the fences and
barns show that our faith still abides.

We need to appreciate the nature of our
dependence on domestic animals. This re-
lationship has its sanitary bearings. A
number of the animal diseases are trans-
missible to man. A healthy herd goes far
toward insuring a healthy family; and the
habit that develops good health in animals
is likely also to develop good health in
human beings.

Diet
In many families the diet 1s monotonous,
innutritious, and poorly prepared. It is
not such as to develop strong and resistant
bodies. There are some geographical
D6

HEALTH CONDITIONS

regions in which this deficiency is marked.
Weare beginning to feed our cattle directly
for milk-production or _ beef-production,
that is, for efficiency. We ought also to
begin to feed ourselves for efficiency. What-
ever is said of the country cooking, how-
ever, it has the transcendent merit of being
honest; it is just what it pretends to be.
The most artistic fabrications (with music)
may be compounded in the victuals that one
finds at the polite hotels and restaurants.

Waters and wastes

The general dependence on wells has an
important bearing on health in the open
country. We all know what dangers are
likely to overtake the well, unless it is very
carefully safeguarded. The spring may
be safer or it may not, depending on cir-
cumstances. The point is that we need to
give increased attention to the guarding of
our water supplies, whatever their source.

The greatest care must be taken to re-
move the wastes. Perhaps there is no
single deficiency in country life that is
more marked than this. Soil-pollution and

57

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

water-pollution are responsible for a num-
ber of our most widespread and danger-
ous diseases. Typhoid fever is one; the
hook-worm disease of the South is another.

Sanitary houses

There are very few sanitary dwellings.
This is true of country and city alike. We
have builded houses for protection and to
eover our household gods, but we have
given very little attention to building houses
for health. Fresh air, sunlight, water sup-
plies, removal of wastes, the saving of
steps and of useless effort, cleanliness,
cheerfulness, restfulness, must all be con-
sidered in a residence that is really good to
live in.

Highways

The lack of good highways has its public
health significance. It is difficult to secure
expeditious medical and surgical service
in many parts of the country because of the
lack of traversable roads. It is natural
that the physician or surgeon should dread
such roads. This lack of service is likely

a8

HEALTH CONDITIONS

to increase the countryman’s confidence in
the medicine bottle, and also the depend-
ence on the midwife who in many cases
may not be too cleanly or too well informed
and the results of whose practice may not
at once be apparent.

Rural diseases

A number of important diseases are
mostly rural and need to be given special
attention by those who are interested in
country-life affairs. Typhoid fever is es-
sentially a rural disease in its origin; so is
malaria. Perhaps the most remarkable
example now before the public is the hook-
worm disease of the South, to which I have
already referred, and which is said to in-
volve four million people. The parasite
that produces this disease has been termed
“‘the germ of laziness.’’ It is quite hope-
less to rely only on teaching and preaching
with persons who are ill with hook-worm;
they need medical attendance.

59

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

2. SOME OF THE REMEDIES FOR HEALTH
CONDITIONS

My first observation is that it is natural
to be healthy. Ido not know whether most
of us have discovered this fact. We have
put the emphasis on disease. We have
thought sickness to be a kind of judgment
or punishment, as if we were all doing
penance in this world. When we meet a
friend, we say ‘‘I hope you are well:’’ the
presumption is that he is sick, but we still
have hopes that he may have escaped. We
must overcome the notion that disease is an
act of Providence. There seems to be a
widespread belief that the organs of the
human body tend to go wrong and that
therefore they must be regulated; so we
have liver regulators, stomach regulators,
nerve regulators, and others. Weare begin-
ning to place the emphasis on sanitation
rather than on disease. It is natural for a
fruit-tree to bear: it is our business to re-
move the obstacles to its bearing; it is
natural for human beings to be healthy: it

60

HEALTH CONDITIONS

is our part to remove the obstacles. We
now have colleges of medicine and of dis-
ease, but we shall sometime have colleges
of health. The mental attitude toward
health and disease is the first thing to be
considered. To a great extent, our state
of mind determines the bodily functions
and controls the progress of disease. This
is well illustrated in the undoubted success
of many of the systems of faith cure. We
must arrive at a sense of mastery over our-
selves.

New kind of dwelling

We must have a new kind of country
residence. Every building should be
adapted to its place and its uses, and it
should be built as largely as possible of
native and local material. Many a farm-
er’s wife has worn herself out by going up-
stairs and downstairs and traveling through
intermediate rooms, when a different plan
of the building might have placed the
kitchen and dining-room and the supplies
within easy reach. Water must be taken
into the house and all wastes must be taken

61

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

out and safely disposed of. It is not diffi-
cult to supply water to a farm residence.
It can be supplied from springs, pumped
by windmills or gas engines, syphoned
from wells on higher land, provided from
roof water stored in attics, or by the pres-
sure-tank system. The time will soon come
when every first-class farm home will be
supplied with these essentials. It is the
part of the colleges of agriculture to intro-
duce a new rural architecture.

I know it is difficult to overcome the prej-
udice, but I think that I have the solution
to the question: I advise country girls not
to accept the proposal of any young man.
until he promises to provide the house with
water supplies and a sanitary kitchen. The
question could be settled in ten years.

Inspections

Rural manufacturing establishments that
prepare food must be inspected, not only
as to the honesty of the product but as
to its wholesomeness and _ healthfulness.
Creameries, cheese factories, canning fac-
tories, and others are of this kind. Of late

62

HEALTH CONDITIONS

years the practice has developed of inspec-
tion of dairies. and creameries by city
boards of health. The city considers this
to be necessary in order to protect its
people. The city inspector, however, is
likely not to understand the practical con-
ditions under which the farmer works, and
antagonism often arises between the city
officers and the producers. It is really not
a city function to inspect dairies and
ereameries. It is a state function. This
work should be performed by a state de-
partment or state college or some similar
institution that is entirely unpartisan and
non-political and that is thoroughly con-
versant with farm conditions and in sym-
pathy with the farmer as well as the con-
sumer.

Greater attention needs to be given to
local slaughter-houses. Many of them are
not only an offense to the community but
present most unsanitary conditions through
the feeding of the offal to swine, and other
practices.

63

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Attitude of societies

The regular rural societies and organi-
zations should now begin to discuss public-
health questions in the same spirit in which
they are accustomed to consider purely
agricultural questions. The wide-awake
physician should be interested in these sub-
jects, and the sanitary engineer and others
should have a modern and rational point
of view on the question of good health and
physical development. It is especially im-
portant that women’s clubs take up this
kind of work energetically, and they have
done this in many places.

The rural organizations carry a respon-
sibility in the training of farmers in other
than the technical agricultural relations.

Farm laborer

We must develop a new attitude, at least
in some parts of the country, toward the
laboring man. We must regard him not
only as a fellow man, but we need also to
see that he does not become a spreader of
disease and thereby a menace to the com-

64

a fees

HEALTH CONDITIONS

munity. No doubt a part of the typhoid
fever is due to cases of ‘‘ walking typhoid”’;
and the danger of the spread of tubercu-
losis and other diseases by means of poorly
housed, unguided and transient farm labor
is by no means inconsiderable.

The school

Of course, the school has a responsibility
to public health, for good health is mostly
a direct question of teaching. The school
should teach persons how to live. This
means that every pupil who has had any
school training should have some kind of
an idea of the bodily functions and their
control, and how and what to eat. It is
less important to teach physiology as ordi-
narily understood than to teach hygiene.
It is the part of the schools to correct and
eliminate the mock sentiment that now
precludes an understanding of the natural
functions of the human body. The lack of
discussion and rational knowledge of these
subjects contributes directly not only to
physical inefficiency but to a coarse vul-
garity. It is a good suggestion recently

5 65

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

made that one week of each year be given
over in the schools to the discussion of
health and sanitation, this period to be
called a ‘‘ Health Week.’’

Supervision.

I may summarize these suggestions by
saying that every one of us carries a nat-
ural responsibility to develop good pub-
lic health. We are all under obligation to
see that society is effective, and it cannot
be effective without strong and smoothly
working bodies. We must develop a new
spirit toward the isolated and the disad-
vantaged man. ‘This spirit would have
great results in the training of rural people.

Government must interest itself in health
as well as in other social and economic
questions. The federal government has no
legal right or power to investigate human
diseases in any of the sovereign states, ex-
cept at quarantine stations, although it
may freely investigate the diseases of
chickens, cattle, and pigs. Certain sani-
tary questions are so important and wide-
spread that they become national rather

66

HEALTH CONDITIONS

than state problems. One of these is the
hook-worm disease of the South, mentioned
before. If society has a right to compel
persons to go to school, it has an equal
moral right to compel them to be healthy.
We concede the right of government of
calling men out to war. It is a marvelous
thing that the mass of mankind will allow
itself to be driven to slaughter. I am won-
dering whether the time will not come when
it will allow itself to be driven to life and
health. Society now has a right to kill, but
it has not an equal right to make well. The
last right that a man surrenders is the ©
right to be sick.

We must establish a better regulation of
health in the open country. City boards of
health are continuously in operation and
usually they are effective. If the open
country has a board of health, it is usually
operative only when some epidemic or
other dire necessity arises. A thorough-
going health organization for the open
country is aS important as similar organ-
izations for the city, and it is to the inter-
est of society and of each of us to see that

67

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

such a provision comes about. This regu-
lation must be both state and local; and the
work should be nationalized by the estab-
lishment of public-health work on a worthy
basis at Washington, and by a widespread
educational propaganda.

68

ORGANIZATION

ARMERS have not yet learned how to
work together effectively. They have
numberless organizations, but there is a
lack of good ‘‘team work.’’ The very indi-
vidualism of the man makes him either
suspicious of other men or undesirous of
working with them. The farmers in any
region are engaged mostly in the same
kind of farming, and they regard them-
selves as competitors rather than coopera-
tors. It is now beginning to appear that
it is usually more profitable for a farmer
to grow the same crops that his neighbors
do, for the community comes to have a
reputation for certain products and it at-
tracts buyers and bidders; better transpor-
tation rates and facilities are secured; and
the common interest brings expert know-
ledge into the community. The immediate
region, rather than the separate man,
should be conceived of as an economic unit.
69

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

When firmly united on correct principles,
a community of farmers can accomplish
anything within reason in the regulation
of production, labor, markets, schools,
churches, and general betterment. They
should seldom organize merely to oppose or
expose the existing conditions, even though
these conditions are bad, but gradually, by
eareful study and systematic action, to
bring a new condition out of the old.

The educational results of organized ef-
fort must not be overlooked. Many boys
and girls have been put in the way of im-
proving themselves by the local grange,
pomological society, or other club or so-
ciety.

Organized effort becomes an active
means of real training of farmers, a kind
of community school. There are localities
in which organizations of one kind or an-
other have transformed the life of the
region.

The farm home is a democracy
The farmer really has the very best
school in codperative democracy in his own
| 710

ORGANIZATION

farming, if his business is properly con-
ducted. All members of the family are
workers. The home is so much a part of
the farm that one is not sold without the
other. If the boys and girls are given a
share-interest in a good farm (and allowed
to keep it), they usually like the business
and stay on the farm. The same principle
might be applied to the community.
Inasmuch as the city, speaking broadly,
has not yet solved the problem of perma-
nently providing a growing population, the
farm home assumes a most important rela-
tion to civilization. It is charged with the
duty not only of maintaining the open coun-
try but of contributing population to the
city. The farm home also carries an
obligation to maintain the quality of the
population. It is a preservator of morals,
and it is well, therefore, that the farming
people is conservative. I hope that the
country folk realize these responsibilities.

The farmer’s fatalism

Experience in working together has its
psychological results. The real country-
te A

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

man is likely to be a fatalist, although he
may not know it and he may resent it if
told. His work is in the presence of the
elemental forces of nature. These forces
are beyond his power to make or to un-
make. He cannot change the rain or sun-
shine or storm or drought. The result of
this is that the man may either develop a
complacent and joyful resignation, taking
things as they come and making the best
of them, or else a species of rebellion that
leads to a hopeless and pessimistic outlook
on life. I am convinced that much of the in-
ertia of country people is traceable to the
essential fatalism of their outlook on the
world. |

This outlook of helplessness is to be
overcome by giving the man the power and
courage of science, whereby he may in some
degree overcome, control, or mitigate the
forces of nature, or at least effectively ad-
just himself to them; and by securing the
impulse of collected action.

Agricultural colleges, experiment sta-
tions, and other institutions are giving the
countryman no end of fact. We have not

72

ORGANIZATION

yet organized this fact into such a philos-
ophy of application, however, as to give the
countryman full confidence in his ability to
contend with his native conditions. The
new knowledge that the farmer acquires is
likely to be held as a mere passive posses-
sion; it does not work itself out into action
as it would in the case of men who are or-
ganized to accomplish definite results. An
organized community is one in which the —
new knowledge and appliances are put into
use.

The community should prove up

Rural societies can accomplish much for
the community by putting up money to
have special investigations made of the lo-
eal or special problems. A society of gin-
seng growers recently made a purse to eall
in a plant pathologist to make investiga-
tions of ginseng diseases. This illustrates
a very important principle: the college of
agriculture or the experiment station of
the state cannot find the funds to meet all
the difficulties in the state, and the people
should be willing to contribute money for

73

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

the solution of the problems of their special
business or region (page 6). It is no
doubt the part of the institution or of far-
mers’ institutes or other agencies to set
backward neighborhoods into action, but it
does not follow that the institution should
forever carry the neighborhood or indus-
try. As a neighborhood becomes pros-
perous, it should be glad to help those who
are less fortunate. The farmer has been
so long accustomed to saving that it is hard
for him to acquire the habit of giving.

If a stock-growing community is per-
plexed by a feeding problem or a pear-
growing community is injured by the
pear-blight, let the people unite and call the
best advice. If investigations are needed
that the college or experiment station can-
not undertake, let the people collect a purse
of say $600 a year for two or three years
and have the institution send a special post-
graduate or advanced student into the re-
~ gion to work the problem out under the
immediate direction of the college author-
ities. This would give the locality the
benefit of the most expert help at the mini-

74

ORGANIZATION

mum cost, and it might be helping a needy
and worthy student at the same time; in
this way, the locality could have the dis-
tinction and satisfaction of maintaining
what would be practically a scholarship or
fellowship, and the people would become
active codperators in the public work of
the state. In very many cases this method
would be far better than the common prac-
tice of running to the legislature for every
- difficulty, and it would eliminate the neces-
sity of depending for betterment work on
the politician and office-holder. It would
strongly develop the ability of self-gov-
ernment.

It does not follow, because a county fair,
a farmers’ club or a shipping association
asks the college of agriculture or experi-
ment station to send exhibits or a lecturer
or an investigator, that the institution is
under obligation to do so. It may be quite
as important that the local organization
““prove up,’’ show that it deserves the help,
that it will take pains to codperate and to
execute the work. I have known many
cases in which the people in the locality sit

75

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

idly by or look on in curiosity while investi-
gators work hard to throw light on a local
problem; and I have gone back into the
community years after to find the same
difficulties and to hear the same questions
as to cause and remedy. This is not fair.

The country church

It is not only a question of making new
organizations, but quite as much of re-
directing old ones. The country church is
one of the organizations that need to enter
new fields, or, perhaps better, to do some
of their workinanewway. Allof usandall
organizations bear responsibility to soci-
ety, the church as much as any and perhaps
more than any. Rev. 8S. W. Pratt, in Al-
legany County, N. Y., suggests that ‘‘a
country church might organize a Farmers’
Brotherhood to good advantage.’’ There
are many country churches that are carry-
ing this responsibility. The system of
cooperative creameries in Minnesota grew
out of an organization at Clark’s Grove,
and this parent organization came out of
the local church.

76

ORGANIZATION

The country church has a much larger
responsibility, and, therefore, a much
larger opportunity than the public in gen-
eral has realized. If it once recognizes its
social responsibility to its community, it
will exercise an even more powerful influ-
ence than it does at present, and will be
one of the very important factors in our
rural progress. In many places the rural
church has practically died out. In other
places it is very weak. Many persons have
felt that the usefulness of the country
church is passing. This may be true to
some degree if the church is to hold merely
to the kind of work that has been done in the
past ; but the best outlook isthat which would
reorganize the church, wherever necessary,
into a much more energetic engine for the
public good. The country saloon is open
continually. The country church ought
also to be open continually, or at least it
ought to have a continual personal contact
with its people; and this contact must be
much more than through customary reli-
gious work.

17

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Young Men’s Christian Association

A typical example of the application of
organized effort in rural problems, is the
new ‘‘county work’’ of the Young Men’s
Christian Association. A rural county,
rather than a city or town, becomes the unit
of organization, with minor divisions and
leaders. The motive of the work is to de-
velop local leadership and imagination in
all ways that will permanently help the
young men in the localities. We may ex-
pect to see this new movement become one
of the recognized agencies of constructive
rural development.

78

FEDERATION OF Rurau FoRcES

T is possible for all the foregoing
agencies, and many others, to be organ-
ized into one or more federations and to be
united in a general campaign for rural
progress. One of the earliest writers and
workers in the federating of rural organi-
zations in a comprehensive way was Kenyon
L. Butterfield, now president of the Massa-
chusetts Agricultural College. Following
his suggestion, the New England Confer-
ence on Rural Progress was organized in
1907. The organization idea, as a force in
rural betterment, is well expressed in his
book, ‘‘ Chapters in Rural Progress.’’

A successful campaign must come as the
result of the uniting or working together
of all rural forces within given regions.
We already have the beginnings of enough
institutions and of sufficient forces to recon-
struct our rural civilization if only they are

79

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

well supported and if they cooperate genu-
inely for the general good. This coopera-
tion can come about in such a way as not to
interfere with the essential autonomy of
any institution or organization, while at
the same time it ties them all together into
one broad and common effort. The respon-
sible heads of all existing rural agencies
and movements in any state should consti-
tute a kind of consulting board to stimulate
and direct country-life work. It should be
important to combine small agencies into
state and national federations, when per-
sons of wise leadership can be found,
who are free from partisanship and per-
sonal ambition. Such movements should
be intrusted only to persons who see the
whole problem of rural life.

Movements of national importance must
be carried through to a finish by some
responsible agency. If the middleman sys-
tem is to be regulated, some one must take
the lead and be supported by the forces
representing rural affairs. If the church is
to take a new hold on country people, the
movement should be nationalized under

80 |

FEDERATION

good leadership. If the general welfare of
a certain region is to be considered with
any effect, some kind of organization must
take up the work and bring the people to-
gether; this is what the New England
Conference on Rural Progress aims to ac-
complish. In every state or region some
such open organization should stand in a
large way for the working together of all
other organizations so far as they touch
public rural questions.

Reforms and progress are not to be
brought about by abuse of the present con-
ditions or by a process of muck-raking.
The work must be shaped up in a construc-
tive way and put through by a body that is
beyond reproach and that has fairly defi-
nite aims.

The greatest function of a Commission
on Country Life would be the handling of
such questions as these. A_ national
Commission is much needed to serve as a
clearing-house on rural problems, as an
organ through which the people can ex-
press themselves, and as an agency to
study the whole situation.

6 81

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

We are just now in need of a National
Conference on Rural Progress, associating
the ablest men and women, for the purpose
of laying all these questions before the
public. Such a conference would erystal-
lize the slowly forming movement toward
state and national unity in rural affairs.

PART I

THE SCHOOL AND THE COLLEGE
IN RELATION TO FARM
TRAINING

Tur ScHOOL AND THE COLLEGE IN RELATION
To Harm TRAINING

The special emphasis of this book lies on
the relation of the school and college to the
training of farmers: I shall therefore enter
into this subject in greater detail.

The American movement to reach the
last man on the land originated in a chain
of colleges of agriculture. The present
institutions in the United States are
founded on the Land-grant Act of 1862 and
on subsequent acts, one college in each
state and territory ‘‘to promote the liberal
and practical education of the industrial
classes in the several pursuits and pro-
fessions of life.’’ These institutions
‘‘teach such branches of learning as are
related to agriculture and the mechanic
arts.’’ There are agricultural institutions
of similar scope in Canada.

_ These colleges are reinforced by a chain
of experiment stations, founded on the

federal grant of 1887 and a subsequent act.
. &5

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Practically all of these stations are con-
nected with the Land-grant colleges.
Official departments of agriculture, rep-
resenting several types of organization,
have been established in most of the states.
These departments or bureaus represent
the police powers of the state in respect to
agricultural matters, or become offices for
the advertising of the agricultural possi-
bilities of the commonwealth, or they do
certain educational work, as the holding of
institutes or the giving of instruction to
dairymen. For the most part, they do not
represent high types of governmental or-
ganization or efficiency. They should be
-strongly capable, however, of training the
\ people in legal and governmental affairs as
these matters apply to rural conditions.
The United States Department of Agri-
culture represents the interest of the fed-
eral government in agricultural affairs. It
has recently grown immensely in extent
and influence, and has become one of the
great coordinate executive departments of
government. Much of its work is educa-
tional, and therefore it may be considered
86

\
;

SCHOOL AND COLLEGE

to be one of the institutions that are con-
tributing powerfully to the training of
farmers.

These three types of effort,—colleges,

. experiment stations, departments of agri-

culture—constitute the recognized Amer-
ican system of reaching the rural problem.

- Great numbers of other’ educational

agencies are contributing much to the
solution of the same problem, but they
are not a part of the regular public ma-

chinery. In this book, no effort is made

to discuss the experiment stations and the
departments of agriculture: attention is
given to some phases of the college work,
since it is the chief function of these insti-
tutions to train farmers.

The colleges alone cannot solve the prob-
lem of developing a better country life.

_ The school training is more important

than the college training; yet the schools
have really not entered the field of train-
ing the farmer. There is universal demand

_ 1] have made a discussion of the history and scope of

these colleges in Vol. iv of the Cyclopedia of American
Agriculture.

87

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

that they relate themselves to this kind of
work, and many beginnings have been
made. Naturally, these beginnings are an
adaptation of present school methods to
agricultural subjects; but the outcome, if
they meet the situation, will be a wholly
new or different type of school effort. In
other words, the agricultural and other
industrial teaching will eventually redirect
the schools, so that we shall have a new
conception of what schooling and educa-
tion is, or should be.

In approaching these educational ques-
tions, we may first ask why some boys and
girls leave the farm and why others take to
farming, in order that we may have before
us some of the influences that are to be cor-
rected or encouraged. We may then ask
what the schools are doing to help the situ-
ation. Then we may consider the influence
of the college of agriculture on country
youth, and thereafter discuss college men
as farm managers. Finally, we may dis-
cuss the general relation of the college of
agriculture to the state.

88

Wuy Do tHe Boys LEAVE THE Farm?

HERE are several ways of attempting

to answer the question why the young
folks leave the farm for other occupations
or professions. The commonest way is to
give probable reasons drawn from general
- observation of farm conditions. The ob-
server can readily see many unattractive
features of farm life that he supposes
might influence the young. Another
method is that of the advocate or propa-
gandist, who is likely to fix his attention
on one discouraging feature and to make
it the motive force in the exodus from coun-
try to city. He may see this cause in some
governmental or other disability, which
he conceives to press with particular
hardship on the farmer, and which he de-
sires to correct or reform. A third method
is to ask persons who have joined in this
exodus why they have done so. This is the

89

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

natural and scientific method, but because
of the difficulty of reaching these persons,
this method seems not to have been em-
ployed to any useful extent. It is this
direct method and its results that I pur-
pose now to discuss.

Character of the problem

It is difficult to choose the persons of
whom one may inquire in hope of securing
usable information. Persons in middle life
who are now deeply immersed in affairs
are too far away.from the farm to be
trusted to give an account of the motives
that guided them in their youthful choice;
I have usually found that such persons are
likely unconsciously to color their replies
by the experience of subsequent years.
Those who work at day labor have usually
drifted away from the farm rather than
purposely left it, and their ideas commonly
lack definiteness; and, moreover, these per-
sons are laborers rather than farmers, and
their case does not greatly influence the
larger agricultural and social questions. I
have therefore chosen to inquire of stu-

90

WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

dents, for they leave the farm, if at all,
with a definite purpose, and they are still
near the point of their departure.

Before taking up the details of my in-
vestigation, I should say, perhaps, that
such an inquiry is well worth making
wholly aside from its bearing on technical
agricultural questions. In its larger
phases, the problem is both an economic
and a social question. A migration city-
ward imposes problems of addition on the
city as well as problems of subtraction on
the country. It has a direct relation to
all general questions of population. It
seriously affects land values, and, there-
fore, other values. It has an important
bearing on the vital problem as to where
our people shall be bred. I have elsewhere
tried to show (‘‘The Outlook to Nature’’)
that farmers constitute the chief nature-
bred class of men now remaining to us, and
this fact cannot help having a far-reaching
effect on the character of future popula-
tions.

I am not now discussing the question as
to whether there is, in fact, a general exo-

91

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

dus from farm to town, but am only con-
sidering specific instances; nor am I
assuming that because a person is born on
a farm he should therefore remain on a
farm. Many persons have left the farm,
and we may ask them why they have gone.

An inquiry of students

In 1904-5, I addressed a circular letter
to all students in Cornell University out-
side the College of Agriculture who, I had
reason to believe, were born in the country,
asking (1) whether the person were reared
on a farm, (2) where, (3) whether he in-
tended following some other business than
farming, and why. I also addressed a let-
ter to the nearly 400 students then in the
College of Agriculture of Cornell Univer-
sity, asking similar questions, and inquiring
why they desire to pursue agricultural
occupations. In all cases I asked for first-
hand personal reasons, and, in order that
the respondent might not be embarrassed,
I promised not to make the names public.

The replies fall chiefly into four groups:
(1) persons reared on the farm, but now

92

WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

planning to leave it; (2) persons born in
towns or cities, and purposing to remain
in them; (3) those bred in towns or cities,
and planning to go to the farm; (4) those
raised on farms, and expecting to remain
there. We may now discuss those who
plan to leave the farm.

I make no attempt to discuss the merits
and demerits of farm life, or to place
values on the replies, or to enter the
tempting field of discussion of the psycho-
logical aspects of the cases. I mean to put
before the reader only the reasons that
these earnest young persons think to be
the ones that have determined their choice
of careers. |

Of course these replies in this chapter
are against the farm. They comprise a
series of vigorous indictments against the
business of farming by persons who have
known the business; for nearly all these
persons were born and reared on farms,
and the few others have lived on farms long
enough to make them essentially farm boys.

In this farm-exodus class I have 155 re-
plies. Although the number of respondents

93

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

is not great enough to warrant statistical
conclusions,—I am not making a scientific
investigation,—yet they probably state the
larger part of the reasons that a much
greater number of similar persons would
allege. These replies come largely from
New York, but those from other states,
chiefly in the West, are the same in tenor.
Most of the respondents give more than
one reason for planning to leave the farm.
These reasons I have roughly classified be-
low. It will be seen that the predominant
reason is that farming does not pay in
money, and other reasons are that the
physical labor is too great and the social
advantages are too small; but I prefer not
to comment. The figures give the number
of persons who allege the different reasons:

The question of financial reward

Farming does not pay; no money in the busi-

mess) 8) yt SEARO CIE Maes U0! Te
Difficult to acquire a farm without a start . 10
Farming requires too much capital . . . . 5

94

WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

Discouraged by the fact that farms are mort-

gaged ’ : 5
Farmer cannot ees prices . 2
The farmer buys high and sells low . 1
High taxes near the city . : 1
Expect to farm some day, weet making

money in some other business . . .'. . 15

The question of physical labor

moemuonh Ward work) °°) 2) ak 26
mmrmrrcme am IU Me CON as alae
Perk too monotonous’) Se Dd
Farming is drudgery. . . ELAN
Work is unattractive and nnenieenied PEL BANG
The work is not intellectual . . , 6
No machinery can a aa the hard ae of

Pao tarm .... SVT ye MCh Me
The work is too hese; in tald 3 age : 1
The farmer is too tired to enjoy reading . 1

The social and intellectual ideals
No social advantages or activities . . . . 26
More opportunity for advancement elsewhere 14
The farmer cannot be known in the world. . 5
ieee monotonous: 3 a EE

95

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

The social and intellectual ideals (continued)

The life is confining; no freedom . ute
The association is with uncultivated people .
The occupation is too narrow .

The farm is isolated

‘Women are overworked on the pleat
Farming is physical labor only

People have a low regard for the farmer .
No higher and nobler achievement possible
No high ideals in farming .

Edueation gave higher ideals and ‘Weide
College training unfits for farm work .
Farmer cannot serve humanity

Farming has little excitement . 4

Has come to know the eity and likes it .
Farmer has no political advantages .

Se eee een nNnwMwwwwP,

Miscellaneous handicaps

Natural bent elsewhere . . . HOPMAN
Parental influence against eaeniae :
Teacher influenced against it .
Father was unsuccessful .

The home was unpleasant

Health not sufficient for the ihe
Difficult to secure help

96

BD bo Fo)

Www

WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

Letters from those who have left

Every one of the 155 letters is worth
reading, because these letters express
personal points of view. There is every
internal evidence that they are genuine
expressions of conviction, and are not
written for effect. Since it is not possible
to print all these letters in the space at my
disposal, I have chosen those that seem to
be most definite or emphatic, and at the
same time present divergent points of
view. I first transcribe seventeen letters
from persons reared on farms in New
York state, and then follow with charac-
teristic statements from farm boys of
other geographical regions.

(1) ‘‘The principal reason why I left the
farm and am here in college, working toward
another business, is the influence of the prin-
cipal of the village school which I attended for
several years. He continually urged me to get
away from the farm, to go to college, and prepare
myself for something better.

‘While I was living at home, on the farm,
the attractive side of farm life, as I believe is

7 oT

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

very generally the case, was not brought out. It
was merely hard work all the time. So I, like the
majority of farm boys, was not at all unwilling
to leave the farm.

‘*However, I now sincerely think that I shall
sometime return. I truly love the country and
all the attractions of nature. Since I left it, I
have constantly come to appreciate the country
more. J have spent my summers on the farm,
and very pleasantly spent them, too. I now
firmly believe that farm life may be made the
most attractive kind of life. The trouble is, in
the majority of cases that have come under my
observation, that farm life is not made attrac-
tive for the boys. Many of them have very little
education, and their life is to them merely hard
drudgery from early morning to late at night,
with only a bare living asa return. Hence, they
are only too glad to leave it. They are in the
dark, and don’t know that there is light for
them.

‘‘With the increase of agricultural education
and betterment of conditions in the country, I
believe this will change. The young men will
come to see the brighter side of farm life, and
the attractions and advantages in staying on the
farm.’’

(2) ‘‘I intend to follow some other business

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WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

than farming because I consider that farming is
all work and no pay. It is nothing but drudgery
from morning—early morning—until late even-
ing, and there is little chance for social and intel-
lectual advantages. ’’

(3) ‘‘I have lived on a farm, except for the
last year before entering Cornell, all my life.
My reason for not wishing to continue on a farm
is the financial side of the question. The work is
also distasteful to me, not because it is hard,
for I think a farmer’s life is a comparatively easy
one, but because a farmer’s work is never done.’’

(4) ‘‘The duty of securing from the soil the
means of sustenance for the race belongs to the
farmer. This involves hard and incessant toil
with no adequate reward. The scope of the far-
mer’s activities is limited to the farm upon
which he toils, as is that of his enjoyment.

‘‘The farmer’s burden is heavy, painful, and
without reward, with no prospect of a change in
his condition. Life is short and uncertain. Why
spend it performing a painful task, which is at
the same time a thankless one?”’

(5) ‘‘I intend to follow civil engineering be-
eause it gives a better chance to get out in the
world and keep in better touch with a broader
kind of life. The farm is far from unattractive
to me, and I think the farmer’s life as near the

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

ideal life as it is possible to get. I like the life,
could have a farm of 150 acres for the trouble
of working it, and there is no more fertile land
in the state than that same farm; but a farmer’s
life is rather too monotonous, and it has been my
experience that he vegetates if he is not careful.
This is noticed on going to the city after some
months on the farm.’’

(6) ‘‘I left the farm because I realized that
farming, like any other productive business, needs
capital, and I had only the questionable posses-
sion of brains to capitalize. The only unattrac-
tive feature to me was the young farmer start-
ing out in life with a mortgaged farm having to
compete with men who owned their farms.’’

(7) ‘‘I do not intend to follow farming as
a business, for the following reasons:

‘“a. It is unprofitable.

“‘6. It is a life solely of physical labor. I
consider myself better adapted naturally for
mental work.

‘“c. Although a respectable occupation (all
honest work is respectable), it does not offer a
field for extensive development of the broader
and nobler of human faculties.

*“d. It is a life which involves a never-ending
monotony of daily routine.

‘“e. Viewed from its present status, it is a

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WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

life in which no self-respecting man should ask
a woman to participate. I say this because of
the ceaseless care and unlimited toil which fall
to the lot of the farmer’s wife.

‘“While I have many minor reasons, the fore-
going are the most important that occur to me at
the present time.’’

(8) ‘‘On the farm, there are longer hours,
harder work, and smaller compensation.’’

(9) ‘‘It has been a matter more of accident
than of choice. When I was fifteen my father
retired, being then fifty-five or more. My elder
brother is a farmer (market-gardener on about
fifty acres) and my other brother a civil engi-
neer. As far as finances go, the farmer does
better than the civil engineer, although I judge
their abilities equal, each in his line. The eivil
engineer has perhaps less work and more time
for recreation. I believe, however, that if the
farmer would be satisfied with savings per year
equal to the civil engineer, this condition would
be reversed.

*‘T believe the answer to your question lies
in the narrow-minded and selfish attitude of far-
mers toward their sons rather than in anything
unattractive in farm life itself. In my own
case, my choice is by no means final and is due
to accident rather than to deliberation.’’

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

(10) ‘‘Farm life is unattractive to me because
of the social conditions. Social life on the farm
is simply stagnation. I dread the horrible mo-
notony of such a life. I love farming, I love the
farm. I like to go out in the fields and work
under the clear open sky; but man is a social be-
ing, and is not destined to live an isolated life.’’

(11) ‘‘It seems to me that one can never,
without assistance, become independent on a
farm, and without independence farm life is
little more than drudgery. Life on a farm is
bound to be, to a certain extent, dull and tedi-
ous, with little variety or relaxation. One tends
to become narrow, sordid, and _ self-centered,
with few interests, and to lose his inspirations
for higher things. His finer sensibilities are
deadened by toil, and he becomes entirely uncon-
scious of the many interesting and beautiful
things around him. It is the man who was not
born there who really sees and appreciates the
beautiful things in the country.’’

(12) ‘‘If I had been heir to a large or even
a good-sized farm, I would probably have en-
gaged in farming.

‘‘™he chief reason why farmers’ sons leave
the farm, from my observation, is that their
fathers or their neighbors are always crowded
by their work, and have no time to spend in va-

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WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

cations or reasonable rest periods. This is not
the fault of farm life, but rather the result
of unbusinesslike management and unscientific
operation. ’’

(13) ‘‘My father was a very poor farmer,
although one of the few in the neighborhood
owning his farm, and as I wished to advance
according to new ideas, we could not agree. I
went into the sale-stable business, but wishing
to be more than a horseman, I am seeking for a
degree of doctor of veterinary medicine. Being
heir to farm land, I shall be interested in the ad-
vancement of agricultural lines. When I retire
from active professional life, it will probably
be to the farm.’’

(14) ‘‘When I entered the university and
registered in mechanical engineering, I had the
idea that a fellow had to get off the farm, as
the saying goes, ‘to make something of himself
in the world,’ and that a living could be made
more easily, with more enjoyment, in another
profession. But now, after seeing a little of
the other side of the question, if I had the four
years back again, agriculture would be my col-
lege course. As for country life being unat-
tractive, I have always found it much the
reverse. The best and happiest days of my life
have been on the farm, and I cannot but wish

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

that I were going back again when through with
school work.”’

(15) ‘‘The struggle for a mere living is too
strenuous. Reliable help, a necessity on a large
farm, is very difficult to obtain, either male or
female. The life is pleasant enough in summer,
but the cold and snow of winter and the deep
mud of spring virtually shut out many farmers’
families from social intercourse with their
friends, and tend to make them narrow-minded.
With smaller farms, more scientifically managed,
employing labor-saving devices more generally,
especially in the performance of household work,
and with improved roads and daily mails, the life
would be almost ideal.”’

(16) ‘‘I was reared on a farm in central
New York. It is my intention to go into some
other business than farming because there is not
enough money in it, and because one has to
depend too much on the seasons for the produc-
tion of good crops. One disadvantage is, that
if a farmer wishes to sell anything, he must take
what is offered him, instead of setting his own
price. On the other hand, if he wishes to buy,
he must pay what is asked. In regard to work-
ing farms on shares, there is but very little
money made. Also, the work is too hard and
the hours are too long.’’

104

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WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

(17) (From a woman) ‘‘A woman must be
primarily a cook, whether on a farm or in the
city. It is difficult for a woman to fill this posi-
tion and at the same time manage outside work.
Not so much of this outside work comes to the
woman in the city as in the country. If a hus-
band considers the farm a place to which he
declines to be ‘tied down,’ a woman finds it
rather difficult to get things done on the farm,
enough to keep it in good condition.’’

(18) (Connecticut) ‘‘I intend. to follow the
profession of civil engineering. I did not take
up farming because in New England a farm is
not of much value for earning a living unless
situated near enough to a large city to sell gar-
den truck. Dairy farming is about all there is
left to a farmer, and one firm virtually controls
the market at my place, and places the price
very nearly as low as the cost of production.

‘‘My town is a summer resort for New York-
ers, and being thus thrown into close connection
with them, the young people, as a rule, desire to
be like them. So they either take some course
in a business college and start for the city, or
they start for the city without such training
at their first opportunity.

‘‘Then, too, there are excellent schools scat-
tered all about New England, and the height

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

of the ambition of the young country lad is to
enter one of these schools, and be with the sons
of the ‘big men’ of the country. After he has
passed through the school, he will naturally wish
to follow his classmates on through college.
Since most of these colleges lack an agricultural
department, he chooses some other profession.

‘“‘The older farmers of my section of New
England are quite often wealthy, but they se-
cured their wealth in former years, and they
themselves say that farming at the present time
does not pay, and are educating and encourag-
ing their sons to seek business in ‘other fields.

‘‘Outside of going to the country fair once
a year, the farmer’s son does not see in what
way other more successful farmers are attain-
ing their success. Of course every farmer
takes farm literature, but this does not appeal
to him so strongly as to visit and see for himself
these successful farms.

‘“When I had finished my common-school edu-
eation, my father came to the conclusion that
since, in his opinion, farming did not pay, he
would send me through college, although he
hated to see me leave the farm.

‘‘T might add that the drudgery of such long
hours as are necessary on a dairy farm is an
unattractive feature of farm life in my locality.’’

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WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

(19) (Pennsylvania) ‘‘a. The drudgery of
life on a small farm.

**6. The small profits.

‘“c. The farmer is tied down, because crops,
ete., cannot wait.

‘‘d. Other fields seem to offer possibilities for
greater and nobler achievements.

‘‘These are a few of the unattractive features
of farming that come to my mind. If, when
younger, I had seen more of farming on a large
scale or had known more successful farmers, I
might now be taking agriculture. Even now I
hope some day to own a farm.’’

(20) (Maryland) ‘‘I am intending to be a
civil engineer. There are several reasons why
I did not care to be a farmer. First, farming
in my country, where I naturally would want to
farm, does not pay fair return for efforts. Sec-
ond, the influence exerted at home was opposed
te such a life without a strong desire on my
part, which I did not have. Third, I had a
strong desire to become an engineer.’’

(21) (Ohio) ‘‘Because I was not born the
heir to a fortune. Had I been, I can think of
no more attractive place to spend life than a
farm. Without plenty of money from other
sources than the farm itself, a farmer’s life is
too limited. He cannot travel, he cannot have

107

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

a large acquaintance, or make himself known in
the world. Other lines of business offer more
money, especially if one is naturally qualified
to enter them, and hence broader and more
profitable careers.’’

(22) (Illinois) ‘‘No money in farming. I
like the city and its pleasures. There is nothing
‘doing’ on a farm.’’

(23) (Wisconsin) ‘‘On a farm, especially
dairy, a person is kept at work each day, no
time to be away more than half a day at a time,
as help on a farm is not always to be trusted.
As compared with other occupations, farm life
demands longer hours, harder work, and less
pay; so, being in a position to leave the farm
and receive an education, I did so, knowing
that at any time the farm is there. For inde-
pendence there is no person that can be more
so than a farmer.’’

(24) (Missouri) ‘‘I do not intend to return
to the farm because, with my present education,
I can do better as an engineer.

‘*T think I can best give you the information
you wish by answering the question, Why did I
decide to leave the farm ?

‘fa. There was no money in farming, unless
a man had money to invest. Even then there
was but little.

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WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

‘*h. Disadvantages of being away from schools,
churches, entertainments, social life, etc., which
a city affords.

**c. Somewhat too ambitious to be content
with the quiet life of a farmer.

‘qd. A natural liking for machinery and engi-
neering work.

‘‘e. I was physically not strong enough to do
the heavy, hard work which farm life demands
of the man unable to hire it done. The most
unattractive part of farm life is the long day’s
work, under a hot, sweltering sun, following a
harrow or pitching hay or doing similar work.
Plowing was an exception: I like to plow.

‘‘Farm life has changed a great deal since I
left the farm twelve years ago. Machinery has
been added, making the work easier; farming
has become more scientific, giving scope to the
man who does not wish to be a mere nobody.
For the last few years there has been more
money in farming.

*‘At the end of my arts course I could have
returned to the farm, made a better farmer,
been more contented, and worth decidedly more
to mankind and to my country than I could
ever have been without it.’’

(25) (Arkansas) ‘‘In my part of the coun-
try cotton is the only staple crop, the produc-

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

tion of which is too monotonous. The labor in
that part of the country is all done by negroes,
and, owing to the climate, must always be. The
race question has never affected us materially,
but it must be solved in the next few years, and
the outcome is uncertain.”’

(26) (Mississippi) ‘‘Lack of remuneration in
proportion to the amount of labor. Lack of
opportunities for social intercourse.

‘IT was too far from school, church, and post-
office.’’

(27) (North Dakota) ‘‘I do not care to be a
farmer because, first, I do not like farm work;
second, I do not think there is the chance for ad-
vancement on a farm that there is in other lines,
either social or financial; third, the farmer in
general is not looked up to intellectually ; fourth,
there is not enough ‘doing’ on the farm for a
boy.”’

(28) (From a large ranch in Montana) ‘‘Yes,
I intend to follow some other business, but not
because farm life is unattractive, for my opin-
ion of the farm is health and true freedom; but
I can follow a professional business and have
the farm as a side issue, and through it always
have a steady income.’’

(29) (Washington State) ‘‘I did not leave
the farm because it was unattractive or because

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WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

my home was not a pleasant one. Had there
been only one boy in the family, I should prob-
ably be there to-day. As there were two, one
was naturally the farmer and the other the
mechanic, gunsmith, and engineer. My reputa-
tion in these lines made it necessary for me to do
much technical reading, even before entering
the high school, and every step after that car-
ried me farther from the farm. A year with
the U. S. engineers put the question beyond
further doubt. I enjoy farm life and farm
work.’’

Questions raised by the replies

These native replies at once bring up
many questions of great public concern,
for they have to do, in a broad way, with
the position that the farmer occupies in
the economic and social structure. These
young persons come from good or at least
average farm homes; otherwise it would
be wholly improbable that they would seek
a university training. Exactly forty per
cent. of them desire to leave the farm be-
cause it is not remunerative. It is easy to
say that this financial unsuccess is due to
poor individual farming; but it is a ques-

ii

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

tion whether. a good part is not due to
causes that go further and deeper than
this; and it is the part of the publicist and
statesman to determine what these causes
are.

Farming is virtually the only great
series of occupations that is unorganized,
unsyndicated, unmonopolized, uncontrolled,
except as it is dominated by natural laws
of commerce and the arbitrary limitations
imposed by organization in other business.
In a time of extreme organization and sub-
ordination of the individual, the farmer
still retains his traditional individualism
and economic separateness. His entire
scheme of life rests on intrinsic earning by
means of his own efforts. The scheme in
most other businesses is to make profits,
and these profits are often non-intrinsic
and fictitious, as, for example, in the habit
of gambling in stocks, in which the specu-
lator, by mere shrewdness, turns over his
money to advantage, but earns nothing in
the process and contributes little to civ-
ilization in the effort. If the farmer steps
outside his own realm, he is met on one

112

WHY BOYS LEAVE FARM

side by organized capital and on the other
by organized labor. He is confronted by
fixed earnings. What he himself secures
is a remainder left at the end of a year’s
business.

Neither can the question of the onerous-
ness of physical labor be overlooked in the
replies. About one-fifth of the replies men-
tion this as a distinct handicap. This will
no doubt surprise those persons who have
thought of machinery as eliminating the
toil of farming; but it must be remem-
bered that the farmer is both capitalist and
workingman (in this respect being almost
unique, as a large class of the community),
and that this question takes a different as-
pect according to the point of view from
which the farmer looks at it. The replies
raise the question as to whether the far-
mer is to continue to occupy this dual
position.

The replies of these serious-minded
youths should also set every thoughtful
person wondering what is to be the place of
the farmer in the social scheme of things,
and whether the present trend is doing

. 113

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

him complete justice. About seventeen
per cent. of the replies consider that the
farmer has distinct social disabilities.
They suggest the question as to how far
agriculture is to depend for its progress
on the efforts of the separate individual
farmer, and how far on coordinated effort.

114

so eee

‘Wuy Some Boys anp Girts TAKE TO
F'ARMING

N the previous chapter I presented the
reasons that 155 college students gave
me for leaving the farm to engage in other
occupations. These students saw little op-
portunity in farming, forty per cent. of
them alleging that the business offers no
financial reward. Twenty per cent. said
that the physical labor is too exacting, and
approximately an equal number that no
social opportunities are offered. These re-
plies present one view of the vexed ques-
tion as to what the place of the farmer is
to be in our coming civilization. There
was a Strain of hope running through some
of the replies to the effect that in the
future the opportunities on the farm would
be improved; but, for the most part, the
responses were hopelessly against the busi-
ness of farming as a means of personal
achievement.

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

When I asked for the opinions of those
who had planned to leave the farm, I asked,
also, for the reasons that moved those who
have planned to remove from city condi-
tions to farm life and those who, reared on
farms, intended to return there after leav-
ing college. The responses are most illu-
minating, and, of course, they are hopeful
for those of us who look to the open coun-
try to aid in some large way in maintain-
ing and forwarding the best civilization.

1. cITY TO COUNTRY

Sixty-eight town-bred or city-bred stu-
dents wrote me that they intend to pursue
farming as a business, and to this end had
entered themselves in the College of Agri-
culture. I should explain, however, that I
use the word ‘‘farming’’ in its broadest
sense as comprising those many occupa-
tions that are directly concerned with the
products of the soil and are in intimate
touch with actual rural-life conditions; for
some of these young men expect to be

116

WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING
creamerymen in the small rural factories
rather than actual tillers of the soil.

The nature of the replies

Many of the respondents give more than
one reason for desiring to follow agricul-
tural work, and in the following list the
figures represent the number of times that
the various reasons were alleged:

The personal or subjective desires

Desire to be out of doors, and love of nature . 25

Dee reermtaline ey) SN oes en Be
ea) pen tor farming.) 03)66 sk
Love for growing things PENRO Cy Ms
Love forfarmanimals ..... a hia ee
Desire to change from city to Peg. i
What farming provides
Farming is an independent occupation. . . 18
Pe eeovices healthful life 0.
There is money infarming. . . igs 33

It is an interesting or fascinating cocina 7
Provides as many advantages as does the city 3
Farming broadensone’smind. . .... 8
A most agreeable way of makingaliving . . 2

117.

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

What farming provides (continued)

Provides good home life for self and children

Farmer is never out of work

He is not subject to unions . ;

Country people hold many things chins He
cause they do not have to pay for them .

Farming requires and develops skill .

There is time for study . :

Opportunity to understand nature .

Great economic and social possibilities .

Provides a cheap living .

It is a noble work .

It is a useful work . :

A means of uplifting the civeenuaite

It is an active life .

A

ell ell oe

What the letters say

Following are some of the letters in full,
chosen because they strongly present va-
rious points of view:

(1) A town-bred boy from the South, desiring
to take up ‘‘general farming.’’—‘‘I have always
had a natural desire to work among economic
plants and animals, and make my soils and barns
the laboratories for such economic work. It is a
supreme pleasure to see and to help accomplish

118

WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

the fulfilment of cértain laws of the funda-
mental sciences to as high a degree as possible,
under the conditions put in force, and get a
result, in course of time, that brings much money
and happiness. A farmer of this sort becomes an
independent man in every sense of the term,
and should prove a valuable citizen in his home
eommunity. His increasing love for and study
of nature also become valuable assets.’’

(2) A town boy, expecting to go on a farm.—
“*T like farming because it is independent,
healthful, noble, useful, and wide enough to
utilize all of one’s faculties.’’

(3) From the city, desiring to follow farm-
ing.—‘‘Because it is the most independent life
and the most healthful one; also, a man is free
to do as he pleases, for he has not a boss stand-
ing over him all the time. The things around
him grow up with him, and each has its own
particular place in his life.’’

(4) Reared in a city of about 100,000, and
now desires ‘‘to get a position on some large,
well-run farm.’’—‘‘My main reasons for living
on a farm are because

‘‘a. I much prefer the country to the city;

**6. I think there is a good opportunity to
make a success as a scientific, businesslike far-
mer on a large farm;

1bh:,

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

‘ec. The living expenses are less on a farm,
and for me the pleasures are more numerous.’’

(5) Reared in a town in Germany.—‘‘I de-
sire to have a farm after I have saved enough to
get what I want, and after I have seen enough to
know where my best possibilities are. I want to
go on a farm because I love the independent life,
because I see business there, because I have a
good, strong opponent (nature) on which to
grind my knowledge, and because I want to
demonstrate the feasibility of some social and
economic problems in which I am interested.’’

(6) Reared in a city of 100,000 inhabitants,
and desiring to be a farmer.—‘‘Primarily, for
pecuniary profit; secondarily, for the indepen-
dent, healthful life.’’

(7) Reared in a city.—‘‘Perhaps the farm is
attractive to me for much the same reasons that
the city attracts country-bred lads—a desire for
change. One thing is certain, I do not want to
be cooped up in a factory or office all my life. I
have seen all I want of factories. A farmer works
hard, but he is never out of a job; never on a
strike, and never subservient to a labor union.
Lack of experience, lack of physical power to
endure heavy labor, and the necessity for a
reasonable income in the near future, will force
me to take a town position; but sooner or later

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WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

I hope to be a farmer, keeping a salaried posi-
tion until the farm assures me a good living
and is entirely paid for.”’

(8) From a woman born in the city, and
wishing to follow ‘‘some not too strenuous out-
door oceupation.’’—‘‘I desire to go on a farm
probably because I never lived on one.

‘¢*“Asarule a man ’s a fool;
When it ’s hot he wants it cool,
And when it ’s cool he wants it hot—
Always wanting what is not.’

‘‘My father and my mother’s brothers were
born on the farm; but they left it as soon as
they were old enough to act independently, so
that, in my farming notions, I have no encourage-
ment from relatives. They, however, had their
way to make. I do not expect to make money
on a farm,—that is, not primarily,—though I
hope to make the farm support me (who am the
proposed overseer) and all the other workers
on it.

‘‘A farmer who works his own farm is only,
after all, an independent day-laborer, and no
one can blame a young man for trying other
methods of making a living. The case of some
women with a small amount of capital is quite
different, however. For instance, if a woman

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

has a strong love for green fields and trees
and animals; if every living, growing thing is
interesting to her; if she has had a college edu-
cation; has seen the world, or a good portion of
it, knows, besides, what office work in a city is,
and is thoroughly acquainted with boarding-
house life, she is in a position, I fancy,
thoroughly to enjoy a real home on a farm and
all the luxuries which that implies. It is only
people of experience who can fully appreciate
the country and what it can give. The country
man holds many things cheap because he never
paid directly for them.

‘‘To be sure, the farm must have all the so-
called ‘modern conveniéneces,’ with telephone
and rural free delivery, besides; and, if the
woman expects to live on it the greater part of
the year, it should have good railroad connec-
tion with some large city. The woman whom
we are considering expects neither to follow the
plow, do the chores, nor the housework, except
in eases of emergency; but she should be capable
of doing any one of them, and is trying to become
so. What a generous life such a woman can
‘ Jead on a farm on an income which would sup-
port her but meagerly in a city! This is my
theory. When I have put it into practice, I hope
to be able to substantiate it.”’

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WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

2. COUNTRY TO COUNTRY

It. was to be expected that the most
significant responses would come from those
students who have had experience of farm
life and also of college life. I have replies
from 193 students of this class, all enrolled
in the College of Agriculture at Cornell
University. Aside from the great signifi-
eance of these replies from the occupa-
tional point of view, the responses afford
an interesting commentary on the wide-
spread notion that the agricultural col-
leges ‘‘educate the boys away from the
farm’’; and what is true (or not true) in
this particular agricultural college is also
true in others.

Replies from farm students

Following is a tabulation of the various
reasons that-are alleged by these 193 farm
students for desiring to remain on the
farm. I publish them only for the purpose
of stating some of the motives that actuate
farm boys, and not as statistics or as a con-

123

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

tribution to a scientific study of the general
problem.

The personal desires

Love of out-of-doors and of nature . . . . 55
Love of farm life and of the kind of work . . 47
Love for living and growing things . . . . 28
Love of the free life of the farm. . . . .15
Natural bent to the farm’ .°. >. ee

Have already a personal interest in a neal ee

What farming offers or provides

An angependent life eS Rar esr ae
yar ne ered bate)! 8 RG ae 2
A profitable occupation 002) \.%keoe. SoS aS
Mot a hurried Tite! 5 60.0) Ce ae an ee
A mB GUral ER et eer ke Siu neue tN Geno eae a
A Bape Mate iN ews . Cy eee
Wide opportunities offered iy Fae: ae

Ideal place for home and rearing of children 20
Involves interesting social and economic prob-

lemme Aes 8
It is a pleasant ne ‘shauibis Ridiation ae

provides Athappy nieve Ss eee
Tt as: NStruehVE! WINE? MTU mek) a) Gee

124

WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

State aid is making farming more attractive .

Farmer’s condition is better than the average
_eity man’s. ;

A good education is ssnonaial :

Opportunities for study . :

Best place for spiritual life and dares

Good social opportunities

Opportunity for individual work pe in-
itiative .

Cheaper living ee in ne fies

An honorable occupation

Has more knowledge of ae vais of eter
occupations ‘ :

One can see the fruits of ties own labor 3

Provides a better life in old age .

The life is not monotonous .

Farmers have good food .

Provides opportunity to acquire Se a

Farming provides both mental and physical
work . yh :

It offers a variety of Gre . :

The work is useful; it affords good (eatinieds
it is easy in ioe BE a EO ee |. Cegaany

H= CO OO

bd pet et be HD ON

1

Along with these reasons for desiring to
remain on the farm, some of the respon-
dents also mention disadvantages ; but they
regard these disadvantages as being over-

125

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

balanced by other considerations. These
disabilities are as follows:

No money in farming .

Requires better health than fhe ee goadent tats

Farming requires more capital than respon-
dent possesses

Farm life is lonely .

The work is hard

Farmer does not control prices

Small opportunities for development

No employment for women .

He

em ee DD GW CO

Letters from farm-bred students

It will now be interesting to transcribe
some of the reasons that these farm boys
allege as determining their choice to re-
main on the farm, for they may be looked
on as indigenous and non-theoretical; and
these reasons have the advantage, also, of
having been formulated after the persons
had seen something beyond the farm. It
is most interesting to know, also, that
nearly all these 193 students are from New
York state; for it is often asserted that
agriculture offers little inducement in the
old East as compared with the West—a

126

WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

statement which usually is made in igno-
rance of the facts.

(9) ‘‘I was reared on the farm where my
father was born and where my grandfather
lived. I like dairying and general farming. I
choose farming because I like to care for horses
and cattle and to see the crops that I have
planted grow; and I like the independent life
that the farmer enjoys.’’

(10) ‘‘I think the farm offers the best oppor-
tunity for the ideal home. I believe that farm-
ing is the farthest removed of any business from
the blind struggle after money, and that the
farmer with a modest capital can be rich in in-
dependence, contentment, and happiness. I
lived one year in a city (Philadelphia), which
was long enough.’’

(11)‘‘The farmer is the most independent
of men. He leads a happy, out-door life, and
is his own boss. His conditions are much better
than those of the average city man.’’

(12) ‘‘I wish to live on the farm, for I like
the work. One is not doing the same thing
every day, but doing a variety of things. There
is satisfaction in knowing that the products of
one’s labors are to be his and not somebody’s
else. Then, there is the independent life; one’s

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

time is his own, and if one does not use it to
the best advantage, he has only himself to
blame.

‘Tf I were unable to farm on my own account,
but had to work out, then I should go to the
city.’’

(13) ‘‘I lived in the city until I was eleven,
when my parents moved to the farm. There I
attended the country school until I was fifteen,
when I was sent to the city high school in Buf-
falo. The last six years I have been in the high
school and at Cornell.

‘*T desire to go on a farm because of the inde-
pendence and healthfulness of the life. The
farmer has a wider field of business, which re-
quires a vast range of knowledge, far beyond
that required by the ordinary business man. I
think that a comfortable income can be obtained.
Only a few men in the cities are earning more
than is required for their subsistence. My chief
reason is that I like the life and the out-door
work..’’

(14) ‘‘a. Respect for agriculture as an occu-
pation.

“hb. To enjoy the freedom of the country life
and the beauties of nature.

‘‘c, To partake of the pleasure which comes
from conquering natural obstacles.

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WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

‘<d. To give that which is in me the best
chance to develop. |

‘‘e, To have a congenial means of support.’’

(15) ‘‘I intend to stick to farm life, for I
see nothing in the turmoil of city life to tempt
me to leave the quiet, calm, and nearness to
nature with which we, as farmers, are sur-
rounded. I also see the possibilities of just as great
financial success on a farm as in any profession
which my* circumstances permit me to attain.’’

(16) ‘‘Have always lived on a farm, with
the exception of three years, when I lived in
town. I desire to follow farming, with stock-
breeding and dairying as main branches. I be-
lieve it is the most independent life; that it has
the broadest field in which to work; that intelli-
gence, judgment, and business ability are needed
here as much as anywhere; that it gives oppor-
tunities for the best development of a man;
that a farmer may enjoy many blessings which
can not be measured by dollars and cents. It
gives opportunity for study of the most inter-
esting kind, and it is the best place for spiritual
growth and life.’’

(17) ‘‘Having always lived on a dairy farm,
and having taken care of domestic animals, it is
virtually the only business I understand.

‘‘Although there are many discouragements

2 129

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

and a great deal of hard labor, I think a person
of average ability, who enjoys farming and tak-
ing care of and studying characteristics of
domestic animals, will be a more independent
and useful man if he sticks to the farm than if
he follows any other business.

‘‘Perhaps there would be more money in
some other line of work. Money is not all of
life; so I will go back to the farm.’’

(18) ‘fa. I like the work.

“6. The farmer is the most independent man
that lives.

““c, It is healthful work.

““d. It is a good place for a happy home.

‘“e. There is profit in it, and it is gaining
headway every day.’’

(19) ‘‘I am going back to the farm because
it is the most healthful business I have ever
known and [I like it as a business from start to
finish. The cattle alone are enough to call any
one back to the farm.’’

(20) ‘fa. Because agriculture seems to offer
one of the greatest opportunities financially.

‘‘b. Because I see in agriculture the most
pleasant and agreeable occupation.

‘‘c, Because I love nature, and may be
brought into more intimate relations with it
by this profession than by any other.

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WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

‘“d. Because a great chance for improvement
and advance is offered in agriculture.’’

(21) ‘‘I have tried city life, and do not enjoy
it. I prefer to work in the open air, and enjoy
working with animals. I believe that a man
can be as truly successful on the farm as any-
where else, and can lead a much happier life.’’

(22) ‘‘I was born in the country, but edu-
cated in the city, returning home on vacation.
I expect to follow live-stock farming: first, be-
cause it is my father’s desire to keep the family
estate still in the family, and being the only son,
it devolves upon me; apart from this, he pre-
fers that I should be a farmer as a means of
earning a livelihood.

‘Coordinate with this is my own wish to lead
the life of a farmer, probably because I inher-
ited the love for it and because I have always
understood, from earliest childhood, what I was
to do. I love nature, and like to be closely
eonnected with its workings. I like farm life
for the freedom and opportunity offered for suc-
cess from individual work.”’

(23) ‘‘I am an only son. My parents wish
me to return, and, as I study, I see nothing more
inviting. I see this more than ever after study-
ing agriculture at Mount Hermon and here.
Then, if a man is immortal, and I believe he is,

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

it is what he is that counts, and not altogether
money. We need studious Christians on the
farms, and I want to be one.. I expect some
day to have a plain country home. A good
place to live is next to nature.’’

(24) ‘‘I should like to take up experiment-
station work for a number of years, then go on
a! farm.

‘‘q. There is as good opportunity for one to
exercise his business ability and apply his
scientific knowledge on a farm as anywhere.

““6. The average man is surer of acquiring
a competency, and having a good home of his
own, in the country than in the city.

‘‘c, A good farmer will find life less monot-
onous, as well as more healthful, in the country
than in the city.

““d. One man’s social and intellectual in-
fluence will be stronger and .last longer in the
country than in the city.

‘‘e. The best place to bring up children, and
especially boys, is on a farm in a good agricul-
tural community.’’

(25) ‘‘I was born and reared on a farm. It
has always been my intention to become a far-
mer. After living in the city for several years,
while attending preparatory school, I have come
to the conclusion that the farm is the only place

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WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

to develop well-rounded, sturdy manhood. The
farmer need not fear lest his children be led
astray by the evil influences of an indolent city
life; he is independent and, if temperate, sure
of good health and long days.’’

(26) ‘‘I shall follow poultry husbandry and
fruit-growing :

‘‘q. Because of the independent freedom of
farm life.

‘‘b. Because of my desire to raise a family
where my influence will be the dominant one.

- *£e, Because of the false standards set up in
the modern city; namely, hurry, worry, and
selfishness.

‘‘d. Because of the great opportunity of-
fered to the man of skill.’’

(27) ‘‘I like the farm probably because I
was brought up on one, and have learned to like
the free and independent country life, to be with
stock, to harvest the grain and hay, to try to
raise or grow the best and most fruit on a tree.”’

(28) ‘‘I expect to make a business of breed-
ing live-stock. I like to work out of doors,
where the sun shines and the wind blows, where
I can look up from my work and not be obliged
to look at a wall. I dislike to use a pen as a
business. I want to make new things and create
new wealth, not to collect to myself the money

133

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

earned by others. I can not feel the sympathy
which makes me a part of nature, unless I can
be nearer to it than office or university life
allows. I like to create things. Had I been
dexterous with my hands, I might have been an
artist; but I have found that I can make use of
as high ideals, use as much patience, and be of as
much use in the world by modeling in flesh and
bone as I can by modeling in marble.’’

3. THE CONCLUSION

The point of view of all these various
personal replies is most significant, and it
is in bold contrast to the general run of
the responses of those who plan to leave
the farm. The present replies are marked
by the prominence given to ideals and by
the subordination of mere personal emolu-
ment and desire for money. Forty per
icent. of those who are leaving the farm
allege that they do so because there is not
money enough in it; very few of the 261
students who plan to be farmers mention
the expectation of earning money as the
leading motive. and a number of them men-

134

WHY PERSONS TAKE TO FARMING

tion the relatively small earning power
and then declare that they will follow the
business in spite of that handicap. Nearly
every one of them gives higher ideals of
living as the propelling motive, and these
ideals crystallize about two points—the
love of nature, and the desire of a free
independent life.

Moreover, these are responses of strong
conviction. They evidence pride of calling,
and not one of them is apologetic. They
are hopeful; they all have a forward look.
They are surprisingly unselfish. Not one
of them asks for power. They show that
even in this epoch of hurried city-building,
the love of the open country and of plain
quiet living still remains as a real and vital
force.

I was impressed, in the replies of those
who are to leave the farm, with the em-
phasis placed on lack of money, hard work,
and small social opportunity: they had not
had a vision of the new country life; I am
impressed in these replies with the recur-
rence of such ideals as love for the work
that one is doing, education, study, per-

135

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

sonal influence, happiness, service, home.
With these young men, their business is to
be an affair of the heart. We hear much
about the greed of money and power and
the great dangers that threaten our run-
away society; but I wonder whether, in the
end, the countryman will not still have hold
of one of the reins.

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Tur Common ScHOOLS AND FARMING

HE agricultural colleges are now ac-
complishing results of great and per-
manent value, in spite of the fact that they
are isolated from the common schools, on
which good collegiate training is supposed
to rest. The country is well peopled with
good farmers, in spite of the fact that the
school in the open country has given them
no direct aid in their business.

Responsibility of the school

Sympathy with any kind of effort or
occupation, and good preparation for en-
gaging in it, are matters of slow and long-
continued growth. This growth should
begin in childhood, and should be aided by
the home and the school. The country
school carries a greater responsibility than
the city school, in proportion to its advan-
tages, for it is charged not only with its

137

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

own country problems, but with the train-
ing of many persons who swell the popula-
tion of cities. The country school is within
the sphere of a very definite series of life
occupations.

The subjects taught in the common run
of country schools are not the essentials ;
the school does not represent or express
the community. I do not know that any
schools teach the essentials, except as in-
cidents or additions here and there, and
essentials cannot be taught incidentally or
accidentally. Arithmetic and like studies
are not essentials, but are means of getting
at or expressing the essentials. The first
effort of the school should be to teach per-
sons how to live.

The present methods and subjects in the
rural schools have come to the schools
from the outside. If we begin the school
work with the child’s own world, not with
a foreign world or with the child’s world
as conceived of or remembered by the
teacher or the text-book maker, it is plain
that we have by that very effort started a
revolution.

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SCHOOLS AND FARMING

The next step that the school must take
is to realize its social responsibility to its
community. It should be much more than
an educational organism. It must relate
itself to the whole life and welfare of the
people, and be one of the fountains from
which good ideals of service flow.

Educational values

All this supposes that the school is in the
process of developing into a kind of insti-
tution that will serve the living needs of
the time, and be even fundamentally differ-
ent from the existing system. We have
only begun to understand what education
means and what it can do for society. If
this is true, then we must first reconstruct
our ideas of educational values; and there-
fore I pass to a consideration of the old
courses and the new.

An eminent scholar once said to me that
he saw no reason why a dairy building
should be placed on a university campus,
for he could not see that it had any relation
to education. This remark called for no
justification of education by means of

139

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

dairying: it merely expressed his concep-
tion of what education is.

We have so long associated educational
processes with particular subjects that we
are in danger of regarding these subjects
as constituting the sum of education. This
attitude was well illustrated to me some
time ago on the occasion of my visiting a
farm home. There was a disagreement be-
tween father and mother as to where John
should attend college, and I was asked to
judge. The mother closed her argument
with the remark, ‘‘His father wants him
to go to an agricultural college, but I want
him to get an education.’’ In spite of all
my questioning, I could not get her further
than this; but she was sure that she saw a
broad distinction.

1. THE QUESTION OF THE EQUIVALENCY OF
STUDIES

The principle of the equality in peda-
gogical value of all the different lines of
study that comprise the curriculum of the
modern high-school or college, is now

140

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

widely accepted in theory, but there is
much reservation in accepting it in prac-
tice. This reservation is no doubt in part
well founded, and it must be given due
hearing. Every new thing must prove it-
self as against the things that are estab-
lished and accepted. It is right that pos-
session is nine points in the law.

The older order

The old or established subjects are such
as language, literature, mathematics, usu-
ally typified in a ‘‘Latin’’ course. The
new subjects are science on the one hand,
and the industries on the other. The science
course is almost universally accepted as of
equal value with a strictly classical course,
often with the reservation, however, that
more or less Latin and mathematics form a
part of it. The industrial courses are as
yet less completely organized and are of
course less accepted in terms of educational
equivalency. The burden of proof is sup-
posed still to rest on them.

The argument for the Latin course is
that it has met the approval of a long

141

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

line of teachers, that its methods have been
well considered and tried by long experi-
ence, and that it demands such a habit of
concentration and of definite continuing
effort as to give it superior training value.
Latin is prized for its tense, and the under-
standing it gives to the structure of lan-
guage and the writing of English; this
argument is well taken, although it prob-
ably would be difficult if not impossible to
prove that the best English writing and
speaking have in practice come from a
study of Latin, notwithstanding the fact
that Latin has been so universally taught.
There are those who still hold that in its
very essence there inheres in the Latin
course an educational quality that does not
exist in the sciences and the industrial
arts: those who hold this position naturally
feel that all concessions made to the sci-
ences and the industries weaken by that
much the essential intellectual value of a
course of study.

Whether there is in essence a superior
training value in the subjects that are
specially associated with the narrow Latin

142

EE Re Sat OP

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

course, is really not an academic or meta-
physical question. It cannot be determined
by opinion or by any process of abstract
reasoning. In the end, the intellectual
value of all courses of study will be deter-
mined by their results in men and women.
In determining these results, we must be
careful not to assume an arbitrary or single
standard as to what an educated man is.
It is fair to assume that an educated per-
son is one who is so trained that he is an
honorable and efficient member of society,
whose mind is sensitive to all learning and
achievement past and present, and whose
sympathies extend freely to all the higher
emotions of the race. If one were to mea-
sure the men and women of his acquain-
tance by this standard, he would probably
be wholly unable to determine by what par-
ticular educational route the person had
arrived, notwithstanding the presumption
in favor of the classical route because of
its universal presence in schools and col-
leges and the newness of other routes.

For several years I have tried to give
some attention to the character of the in-

143

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

struction by the different kinds of subjects.
It has not appeared to me that language,
literature, and mathematics are any better
taught in the schools and colleges than the
sciences and some of the industrial arts.
It all resolves itself at the last into a ques-
tion of the equipment and personality of
the teacher; and we all know that few
teachers in any subject are as good as we
desire them to be.

Nevertheless, it is right that in any par-
ticular institution the presumption should
lie with the older subjects, until the new
subjects can prove their educational worth
by the severest tests. There is much train-
ing value in orderliness and consecutive-
ness of work, in careful thoroughness, and
in the moral discipline that comes from
obligatory study. To my mind, the educa-
tional values of the different subjects do
not lie in the essence of the subject-matter
so much as in the way in which they are
taught. If different subjects were taught
by the same person, the educational value
of all of them would probably be about the
same. I should not consider the acquiring

144

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

of mere manual dexterity in any subject or
study to be a complete educational process.
Combined with all industrial work, there
should be such a systematizing of subject-
matter and such a method of teaching as
will bring out the underlying reasons and
strongly develop the mental grasp. If the
educational or training value of a course in
science or in an industry is not equivalent
to that of a language or literary course, it
must be because it is not so well taught.

The newer order

We are given to berating the older educa-
tion for not producing better results, but
the fault may not have been so much in the
subjects that were taught as in the fact that
in many cases no subjects were taught well.
There should be a strong central backbone
to any elementary or secondary course of
study, and the same may probably be said
of most college courses. Whether this
backbone shall be the customary subjects
of present courses of study, or whether the
school work shall crystallize about other
subject-matter, may well be left to the

o 145

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

gradual evolution of education to deter-
mine. The probability is that quite another
framework will control the school life in
times to come; if it does not, then the
school will remain relatively stationary.

As the idea grows of the necessity of a
good mental equipment for all persons, we
must be increasingly ready to admit new
subjects into the school and college course.
This means that some schools will develop
strongly in one line and others strongly in
another line, and that the student may
exercise a choice of schools; or, that we
shall come more and more to a depart-
mental organization of schools. No doubt
both methods of organization will develop.
The essential point is that there may be
more than one route in education: it is our
responsibility to see that all routes are of
equal value and dignity.

Whatever may be said or done by the
close adherents to the older means of edu-
cation, it is inevitable that other means
shall come in. This, of course, does not
mean that the old subjects shall go out,
although the teaching of them may need to

146

eg aoe = —

Ses

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

be redirected in some cases: they will con-
stitute one part, but not necessarily a so-
called fundamental part, in a new scheme
of school-teaching. I expect to see a re-
erudescence of the _ so-called classical
studies. I would eliminate nothing from
educational programs, but I would add
everything; and I would have it so ar-
ranged that persons could have a choice of
routes without disparagement or handicap.
- We must train the coming race in the
means and practice of living. New ideals
and aspirations must grow out of the life
that they live. The means of life are con-
stantly more numerous, and their relations
are constantly more complex. When so-
ciety was more homogeneous than at pres-
ent and when it was expected that only a
few persons out of many were to be well
trained, one general line of study suited
very well. But we can no longer neglect to
teach the philosophy of life and the arts by
which men and women become a useful part
of a growing society. In the nature of the
case, therefore, the sciences and the indus-
tries will make headway in our schools and
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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

colleges, and those who would oppose them
are setting themselves against the course of
human evolution.

2. THE NATURE OF THE FORTHCOMING
SCHOOL

The acceptance of the educational equiv-
alency of studies is the very first es-
sential to the development of a kind of
school that is capable of redirecting coun-
try life. The person who rejects this prem-
ise does not accept education in terms of
the daily life, or if he does accept it, his
concurrence is only a concession to popular
demand.

The four R’s

The old schools were built on the four
R’s,—reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic, and
ruler. They were a combination of certain
formal subjects and what is called ‘‘good
order’’ or discipline. There are still those
who held that the pursuit of reading, ’rit-
ing and ’rithmetic is of itself an end in
education. These subjects, however, are

148

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

tools or means to be used in the acquiring
of knowledge and power. Of course, the
pursuit of them is an educational process ;
but the basis of education is at first to
develop the child by means of his activities
and of the things that make up his world:
he needs reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic to
enable him to make use of his world and to
understand it.

Similarly, ‘‘good order’’ or discipline is
not an end in itself. By focusing atten-
tion, it develops the mind to follow a given
line of thought and to be undiverted. It
has its moral significance. But many
teachers seem to act on the principle that
there is virtue in the very act of sitting
still and of not whispering. The school of
the future will have the activities of life in
it; and the ‘‘order’’ of the school-room
will be the order that is naturally a part of
the work that the pupils do; not the order
imposed by the ruler. The only real school
discipline, in the end, is the natural con-
trol that the subject and the teaching hold
over the pupil; it is the pupil’s interest in
his work. The larger part of the really

149

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

fertile school work cannot be pursued by
the pupil in silence and inaction.

Agriculture in the schools

I look to the school, when faced about,
to be an essential factor in the evolution of
the country life that we all hope for. All
the people hold this hope, or something like
it. We may differ as to the kind of school
that is needed. The common idea seems
to be to make an end of the matter by in-
troducing ‘‘agriculture’’ into the school.
Many persons object to this for the ele-
mentary school and some of them for the
high-school, on the ground that children
should not be made or influenced to special-
ize. J am not now asking that the public
elementary schools teach trades and pro-
fessions. George F. Warren has put the
matter tersely in his sentence, ‘‘ While it is
not desirable to try to make farmers, it
does seem desirable to stop unmaking
them.’’

Personally, I have very little care
whether a class in agriculture is introduced
in any school or not: if the people are

150

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

ready for it and the teacher is prepared, it
should go into the high-school and possibly
in lower grades; but the real nub of the
matter lies much deeper than this. The
whole process of the school must change.
We must begin with the child’s world and
not with the teacher’s world, and we must
use the common objects, phenomena and
activities as means of education. When
these objects, phenomena and activities are
agricultural (as they are in a rural com-
munity), then agriculture becomes a means
of education, but it is not agriculture in the
sense of a specialty leading directly to the
occupation of farming. That is to say,
in such cases agriculture (which is the sum
of the community life) becomes the real
backbone and motive of the school. Other
subjects grow out of it and are picked up
with it as the school life proceeds.

I would have the child know the people
of his community, and how they live; how
the community supports itself; its relation
to the neighboring community; how many
schools there are and how many churches,
and how they came to be there; the roads;

151

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

the general lay of the land, and something
about the soils; how many farms in the dis-
trict, and what they produce and why; the
common or significant animals and plants;
the woods and the streams; how the local-
ity is governed; how the houses are built;
what the local factories are; and so on.
And I would teach him how to keep himself
from being sick or lazy. I would not have
all this told to the child as news or pleasant
pieces of information. I would have it
constitute the real work and substance of
the school, carrying the method out to
the world questions as the pupil reaches
the proper understanding; and I would
enrich his life by bringing in the literature
and the history and biography, and incor-
porating them into his education, as the
figures are woven into a fabric.

It may seem to be a difficult thing to
teach all this; but that is no argument
against it, for such things must be taught.
We must train the child into touch and
sympathy with life, not take him out of and
away from life. Ideals that are worth any-
thing must grow out of the common things

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SCHOOLS AND FARMING

and the daily life. Mere abstract ideals
are no ideals at all: they are only dreams.

But these things are not difficult to teach.
We think that they are difficult because few
persons have yet been trained to teach
them. We are so obsessed with the book
habit, and so possessed by what has been,
and so depressed by the domination of
educational method, that we are not free
really to teach.

They say to me that this kind of teach- .
ing would lack definiteness and consecu-
tiveness and would tend to looseness of
school work. My first reply is that I would
like to see school work loosened up. I am
leaving the old order of school work be-
hind. My second reply is that a good
teacher would make this kind of teaching”
just as definite and systematic as any
other; and I am not at all alarmed by the
old bugaboo of ‘‘drill’’ and ‘‘mental dis-
cipline.’’ Such work, when well done,
should have vitality, and this is exactly
what the old process so often lacks; it
would lend itself in the least degree to
memorizing and mummery.

153

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Of course, I would not confine the work of
the school to the local subjects ; but I would
ground the pupil in the concepts of his own
place and time. If he is started and di-
rected right, he should make a better Latin
scholar as well as a better nature scholar ;
and it would be folly to try to bend all his
energies to farming and to nature-study,
or to any other special line.

School to represent the community

All this means that the school represents
and reflects the life of the community, and
works out suggestions for the betterment
of the community. In other words, as I
have said, the school carries a social as well
as an educational responsibility.

Our ideal of a state university is an in-
stitution that really represents the state
and helps in working out the problems of
the state. It lends its aid officially in tax
commissions, railway commissions, public-
service commissions, in problems of agri-
culture, manufacture, mining, and com-
merce. It gives advice in education (which
is its particular specialty) and in social,
economic, and even religious questions.

154

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

Now, I look on the school of the future as
the little university of its community,
working out the problems of the commu-
nity and developing leadership. The school
should aid the rural community (my sub-
ject is country life, and I leave it to others
to write of town life) to better roads, bet-
ter cattle, better butter, to more eggs and
more crops, to better seed corn and better
alfalfa, and to higher efficiency everywhere.
It should be a local forum. It should co-
operate with the church, the library, the
fair, the farmers’ organizations, with every
farmer and every housewife, tying the
community together and making it a better
place to live in.

This cannot come about without active
cooperation by the people. We do not
even yet take our schools seriously. They
must become a part of the government of
the community, and be just as essential as
the crops or as politics. The school must
have much more money, particularly in the
rural districts, than is now given it; and the
people will providethe funds when theschool
begins to do the work.

One of the means of improving the

155

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

schools is the consolidating of two or more
districts into one. No doubt it is often
necessary and advisable to consolidate
schools, but I warn my reader that it is
easy to carry this process too far. It
usually follows that when schools are con-
solidated, they begin to copy city-school
methods. I much doubt whether the meth-
ods of city schools are on the whole such as
will endure, even for cities; and I am much
more in doubt whether they are best for
country schools. There is a value in the
simplicity, directness, democracy, and even
the smallness of the ‘‘district school’’ that
we cannot afford to give up lightly; and it
is an institution of the community. The
sterility of the district school lies not so
much in its remoteness, separateness, and
smallness as in the lack of funds to enable
it to do the work of a school. The state
must come to the aid of the district school.

The high-school

In this discussion, I have chiefly had in
mind the school life below the high-school.
If the primary and intermediate teaching

156

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

is started right, the high-school work will
largely take care of itself. The reform is
needed in the beginning years, not because
the work in these’ years is now more imper-
fect than in the high-school years, but be-
cause the process is a point of view that
needs to be established very early in life,
and because relatively few youths reach
the high-school. In the high-school, the
specializing studies begin. Specially quali-
fied teachers are usually provided, and
these teachers should be able to handle
their own subjects. It is significant that
the popular agitation for agriculture teach-
ing has considered chiefly the children ‘‘in
the grades,’’ and that the books and leaf-
lets have been written for this range.

Process of evolution

I am not criticizing the schools. We owe
everything to the schools. I am developing
a point of view. We are in the process of
evolution. All the improvements in schools
and the introduction of new subjects are
contributing to bring about a new order;
what I should like to impress is that these

157

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

improvements are only steps and are not
ends in themselves. The final result must
be a kind of training institution that differs
radically from the present system both in
its constitution and its processes. We are
coming, as I have said, to a new conception
of the function of education.

3. A SCHOOL MAN’S OUTLOOK TO THE RURAL
SCHOOL

The following sensible and _ practical
vision of the part that the school should
play in the life of the rural community is by
Fasset A. Cotton, formerly Superintendent
of Public Instruction of Indiana and now
President of the State Normal School, La
Crosse, Wisconsin:

‘The relation of rural schools to rural
life is the greatest educational problem of
the present day, and as yet few have real-
ized its stupendous importance. Upon its
solution depends in large measure the fu-
ture welfare and stability of our people.

158

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

This is no idle statement. A study of the
factors involved will show that it is true.
To arrive at conclusions of any value, at
least three phases of rural life must be
studied: material and commercial prog-
ress; social life; and the schools.

‘‘The change in farming methods is one
of the marvels of the century. With for-
ests cleared and swamp lands redeemed,
the steam plow does the work of many men.
The soil is prepared, planted, cultivated,
and the harvest is gathered by machinery.
The sickle, the scythe, the cradle, and the
flail have given way to the mower, the self-
binder and header, and to the steam
thresher. The dairy, from milking to but-
ter-making, has become scientific. Chicken-
raising and stock-growing have become
matters of intelligence instead of chance.
Good roads, steam railways, interurbans,
rural routes and telephones, have all but
eliminated time and distance, and have
brought the farm into close touch with
everyday life in the commercial world.
Easy transportation and the knowledge of
market prices have brought the farmer a

159

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

fair return for his products. While this
progressive spirit has in a way touched all
farm life, this does not by any means tell
the whole story.

‘‘Tt is still a far ery from the small hill-
country farm to the wide western plains
where farming is done on so large a scale.
The difference between what may be called
domestic farming and commercial farming
is tremendous. It is the difference between
the small farm owned and occupied and
cultivated by the owner for a living, and
the landed estate owned by a syndicate or
a wealthy individual and farmed for com-
merce. More and more as the years come
and go, must millions of our people get
their living from the land; and more and
more must domestic farming become a
dominant factor in the life of our people.
It is with this phase of farming rather
than with commercial farming on a large
seale that I am interested, and it involves
at once the question of social life aud edu-
eation of the family. After all, it is the
family that lives on the farm that makes
the problem an interesting one.

160

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

‘‘Before any reliable conclusions are
reached, certain mistaken notions must be
corrected. Doubtless the stories of farm-
ing by machinery and the great results of
commercial farming are responsible for
these. To the unthinking, farming has
come to be one long holiday picnic, when
everybody rides. Nothing can be further
from the truth. Even with the most ap-
proved machinery, there is plenty of work
for head and hand on the farm; and when
it is realized that the use of all this up-to-
date machinery is by no means general,
and, moreover, that its use would be impos-
sible on small farms, it will be apparent
that there is still work to do.

‘Tt looks as though the same forces that
brought farm life into touch with the com-
mercial world might easily bring it into
touch with the social world; and they might
make possible the pleasures, comforts,
luxuries and culture of city life with none
of its unpleasant features. But it must be
admitted that this possibility has not been
very generally realized. In many instances,
the social life of the people has not kept

11 161

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

pace with material prosperity. Big barns
filled with grain, wide fields over which
blooded stock roams, and the latest farm
machinery, have often kept the dwelling-
house small and barren enough of comfort
and beauty. And so it may be fairly stated
that the home interests have not always
kept pace with the material interests of the
farm. The mothers and daughters who
have borne their share of the burden of toil
have been the larger sufferers. Under
existing conditions, it is not strange that
farmers’ children are attracted to city life,
and that they leave the farm. Life is too
hard and the social advantages are too few
and far between. It has been suggested
that the custom of European farmers who
live in villages would solve the problem. It
is thought that such local centers would
relieve the isolation and furnish the much
needed social life.

‘<The real solution of the problem in
this country, however, lies in the codpera-
tion of economic, social, and educational
forces with the school as the center. There
is a vital relation between country life and

162

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

the country school that has not been seen.
The country school has not even begun to
fulfil its mission. MHitherto all schools
have been alike,—city, country, and town.
Their province has not been to educate, to
develop boys and girls into men and women,
but simply to impart facts of arithme-
tic, geography, and history. The coun-
try has had such schools, but they have
never recognized their distinctive environ-
ment or let it make any difference in their
mode of procedure. They have never real-
ized that their problem is a distinct one,
nor that the means are peculiar. The far-
mers could not solve the problem: they
have their own work to do, and it is not
their business; and educators have wor-
shiped tradition so long that it has been
almost impossible for them to look fairly
and squarely at the nature, conditions, en-
vironment, and needs of a child and let
these determine the process and means of
education.

‘‘Now, with the school as the center of
township life, economic, social, and educa-
tional interests can work out the solution

163

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

together. The school center is better than
the village center. It is doubtful if the
latter is possible. In the nature of the case,
most farmers must live on their farms.
Those whose circumstances would permit
could build their homes in the school center
vicinity, but the school, either the consoli-
dated or the large district school, must be
the center. The township school should be
conducted under the ideal conditions men-
tioned above. The teachers should be well-
prepared men and women, thoroughly in
touch with the problems and interests of
the township, and permanent residents of
the community. They should understand
the relation of education and agriculture,
and should be able to create in the boys
and girls a love for the land. The school
should be the center of social life where
the farmers’ families could assemble fre-
quently to hear lectures, to enjoy concerts
and high-class entertainments, and to dis-
cuss problems of vital community interest.
The teachers should be capable of direct-
ing all of this life and of taking part in it.
The school center should be the meeting-
164

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

place for farmers’ institutes and clubs, and
should be the political center of the town-
ship, where all civic questions could be dis-
eussed. What phases of life the principles
of centralization shall include, the commu-
nity will easily decide. Good roads from
every direction will center here, and con-
venience will shortly locate all residences
upon these direct lines. Of course, the
natural conditions of the township must
determine the center or centers, for hills,
streams, and size of the township may
make more than one center necessary.
‘‘Three things, then, are fundamental in
this problem: First: the codperation of
economic, social, and educational forces
with the school as the center is absolutely
essential. The one-room isolated school,
unless a very large one, can no longer meet
the needs of the people. Second: commu-
nity life with its dominant interest, agricul-
ture, must determine the nature of the
work in the school and the mode of pro-
cedure. Third: the teachers must be well-
prepared men and women, capable of
dealing with the problems of life, willing to
165

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

make the community their permanent
home, and to take the solution of its eco-
nomic, social, and educational problems as
their life work.’’

4, THE NEED OF A RECOGNIZED SYSTEM

The work of education by means of agri-
culture is in danger of becoming scattered.
It is being taken up in the public schools
here and there, and the agitation for it is
widespread; but there is yet little organi-
zation or system in it.

Schools and departments in colleges and
uniwersities

Old-line colleges and universities are
also seeking to have schools or departments
of agriculture, often of secondary grade, at-
tached to them. These, also, are no part of
an organized system; and it is not always
certain that their environment will be such
as to insure satisfactory results without
the guidance of some supervising authority
or administrative method.

166

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

In normal schools

Normal schools, more or less indepen-
dent of general supervision, are also be-
ginning to teach, agriculture. They will
prepare teachers for the public schools.

Separate schools of agriculture

There is a rapidly spreading demand for
special or separate schools to teach agri-
culture, and many states have already es-
tablished them. These schools are mostly
outside of any school system and are un-
provided with supervision. In part, they
are no doubt protests against the common
schools, as the separate colleges of agricul-
ture and mechanic arts were once protests
against the established colleges and uni-
versities. In part, they are founded to
provide better facilities and equipment for
the teaching of the rural industrial sub-
jects. In part, also, they are established to
satisfy the desire of communities to have
some institution, establishment, or feature
in their midst; and the school of agricul-
ture is now one of the institutions that are

167

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

relatively easy to secure from legislatures.

These special schools will undoubtedly
be of great value, and they ought to lead
the way in a new kind of secondary educa-
tion; but at the same time we must not for-
get that we have a public-school system
that ought to be developed in these very
lines, and it would be a pity to cripple this
system by diverting attention elsewhere.
We ought not to have duplicate systems of
education. These special schools, of what-
ever plan of organization, should supple-
ment the public-school system, providing
facilities for such persons as desire to go
further than the public school can take
them or who desire quickly to acquire a
working knowledge of particular parts of
farm life.

In secondary schools

The special separate schools of agricul-
ture cannot meet all the needs of country
people for education in terms of their
daily lives. A farmer has a right to ask
that his son and daughter be given facili-
ties for country-life education in his home

168

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

school. The state should not make it nec-
essary for him to send them away from
home for the elements of such education.
It follows that all public schools should be
open to education by means of agriculture
on the same terms that they are open to
education by other means. New York has
the basis for such a development in the act
of 1908 for the encouraging of industrial
and trade schools. I am convinced that
this act marks a clear advance in industrial
education in this country. This law recog-
nizes industrial education as a part of
the proper educational work of the state;
and the principle that the initiative should
lie with the people, and the maintenance be
cooperative between the locality and the
state. It provides that any public school
that establishes such work and maintains
it for a year shall receive $500 from the
state for one teacher so employed and $200
for additional teachers. It limits such in-
struction to those who have taken the ele-
mentary school course. It provides for an
advisory board to confer with the school
officers in respect to the work. Now, train-
169

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

ing in agriculture is only one phase of in-
dustrial education. Training in domestic
or household subjects is another phase.
These principles will probably soon be’ ex-
tended to the encouragement of education
by means of agriculture and the domestic
arts in all schools, both in town and
country.

A statute of this kind provides a means
whereby the state makes additional appro-
priation to the public schools. The schools
need more funds. It is going to be a seri-
ous question whether the money appropri-
ated to the more expensive of the separate
special schools would not go farther if
given to the public schools for approved
work. The public schools are beginning to
rise to the occasion.

In nearly all the states, some scheme or
mode of introducing agriculture into the
public schools is being agitated or tried.
In many places, the work is now actually in
the schools. The work should be guided
and supervised by some competent au-
thority or agency, as the state department
of public instruction or the college of agri-

170

SCHOOLS AND FARMING

culture, or, preferably, by both,—one on
the side of administration and the other on
the side of subject-matter.

When such work comes in the schools,
the state departments of public instruc-
tion must develop a broad policy of indus-
trial education, with a _ well-equipped
bureau or division to: administer it. This
division should also have relation to the
work in special schools of agriculture.
Personally, I doubt the wisdom of sepa-
rating the administration of agricultural
education from that of other industrial
education. The two lines should develop
coordinately; and agricultural training
should be in good part manual or ‘‘indus-
trml”’

Relation of the whole

Time is now at hand when the agricul-
ture teaching in all these institutions
should be related, and when an organized
system or plan should be perfected. The
college of agriculture in each state should
be a part of this plan, dominating at least
the technical agriculture work, so that

171

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

sound subject-matter and rational points of
view may run through all the schools. The
entire development of agricultural training
could then begin to proceed in an orderly
way.

Education of all kinds should be nation-
alized, by the development of a strong co-
ordinating department at Washington.
The United States Bureau of Education
should be much enlarged, by increased ap-
propriations. It could greatly stimulate
country-life education if it had the funds
and the necessary organization.

172

THe CoLLEGE oF AGRICULTURE AND THE
Farm YoutH

E may now ask what is to be the

prospect for the person who is edu-
cated for country life in a college of agri-
culture. It is sometimes charged that the
college educates ‘‘away from’’ or ‘‘beyond”’
the farm. If this is true, it must be because
it either alienates the student’s sympathies
or gives him an unpractical or not useful
training. A main question, so far as the
student is concerned, is whether his sym-
pathies really are in danger of being
alienated.

1. OPINIONS OF STUDENTS

What, then, do these agricultural stu-
dents propose to do with their education?
173

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

The only way to answer this question is to
secure statements from the students them-
selves. This I have done, and the sum-
mary results are given below. It will no
doubt be objected that this method is un-
reliable in indicating the influence of the
college, since a student may not follow his
intentions; yet it is probable that the influ-
ence of a course of study may be better ex-
pressed in the intentions of students than
in statistics of the occupations of persons
who have been some years out of college,
for the occupation is in very many cases a
matter of accident or of circumstances
rather than of choice. The student’s ideals
are developed or confirmed in the college —
course; if later these ideals are modified,
it may be no fault of the course.

The students and their replies

The students of whom I asked the ques-
tions were members of the College of Agri-
culture of Cornell University. My only
reason for choosing this particular college
is because I am connected with it. Prob-

174

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

ably the other agricultural colleges would
give similar results. I have every reason
to think that the replies express honest
conviction. These persons represented
three classes of students: four-year stu-
dents, having entered with full university
requirements and who were working for a
baccalaureate degree; two-year students,
pursuing general agricultural studies, ear-
nest men and women, well grounded in
common-school subjects, and many of them
persons of maturity and strong native abil-
ity, and all of them taking regular univer-
sity work; and two-year specials in the
teacher’s course for nature-study and agri-
culture, all of whom were women. Up to
the time of the writing I had 179 replies
to my inquiries. These replies may be
roughly classified as follows:

175

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

STATEMENT OF THE DESIRES OF 179 STUDENTS IN A
COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE

a~ re)
of 322 av 33
og eb an og
eR ons oA TH
78 students reared g& G22 33 38
a — 3s PI
on the farm aH Beq 4" $8
35 regular students.. 28 6 1
43 special students .. 40 2 1
69 students reared
in town or city
45 regular students... 25 pig q 2

24 special students .. 19 3 a 1

14 American women

students
5 regular students... 2 3
9 special students .. Oieadt natal

18 foreign students

10 regular students.. 8 2
8 special students .. 7 1
179 1990093 )). eae

While these specific replies are too few
to furnish any basis of percentages, they
nevertheless suggest the range of activities
that appeals to a student body. They also

176

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

indicate that the desire for an agricultural
life appeals to many men of many minds,
and that it is apparently not a passing
whim or fashion.

Comments on the replies

The figures in the last column are most
significant, showing that only five of the
entire lot fail to express their wishes as to
choice of life work. Moreover, two or three
of these persons declare that they desire to
pursue some kind of agricultural work.

The desire to engage in farming, as ex-
pressed in the first column, is most various
in kind and is of different degrees of inten-
sity. I made a note of such desires as are
specifically mentioned by the respondents,
with the following results:

Farm students

Desire to return to home farm . . 9. . .. 43
muock alia dairy farming .°. . 0... tk ae
Pereira: PR ee) ae ae
peer armani rrr Or ie
PoGrtEw yew meee ey OL I Een ag
Superintendent or manager . . .... 8

12 7 177

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Town students

Horticulture (mostly fruit and green-

house Dusiiess) oa Nev ee et elie ae
stock and dairy farming). (0.1) sa eee
General farming.) 40.60". a¢t eiiicn borne ea ana
| ag (151 0 a Ga EIN ER MURA AYE We

Many of these persons who desire to take
up direct farming occupations, however,
have no capital with which to start. They
will follow teaching or some other salaried
work for a time, as they tell me in their
replies, in order that they may accumulate
the means to buy land and equipment. Of
course some of them will never get back to
the land after they are once engaged in
another enterprise, but this will be their
misfortune rather than their choice.

The figures are most suggestive as to
the intentions of the town students. There
are, of course, no sharp lines of classifica-
tion as between farm and town. Some of
the students have spent their time in both
city and country, and are essentially towns-

178

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

men, and I have so classified them. Some
farm youths have moved to town, but these
are essentially farmers, because they were
reared in the farm atmosphere. Yet I
think that there is sufficient line of separa-
tion to make the categories worth while.
It is rather surprising that more than
sixty per cent. of these town and farm
youths desire to engage in practical farm-
ing. It is equally significant that all of
those who wish to be landscape-gardeners
are from the town. This is a reflection of
the fact that the art sense is not yet devel-
oped in the agricultural country.

On the whole, this particular student
body, so far as replies had been received,
had set itself distinctly toward the devel-
opment of agriculture, and seventy per
cent. of the respondents would engage in
practical farming if they were free and
able to do so. One wonders what fortune
the years will bring these young persons,
and how many of them will find the oppor-
tunities to which they are looking.

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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

2. WHAT IS TO BECOME OF THE EDUCATED
FARM YOUTH?

Having made this brief examination of
the sentiment of a certain agricultural stu-
dent body, it will now be worth while to ask
what an agricultural education may be ex-
pected to accomplish for the farm boy
and girl in general, and whether there is
to be a place in the world for a person thus
trained. This is the main question, so far
as society is concerned. Are there careers
for these college youth?

There is special reason for asking these
questions, because it is still a frequent say-
ing that college unfits a man for farm life,
and also because there is no phase of edu-
cational work that is now receiving more
attention than agricultural education.
Many of the colleges of agriculture that
have been in an undeveloped state are now
springing into great activity. States are
giving large sums for buildings and equip-
ment, to supplement the proceeds from the
funds of the Land-grant Act of 1862.

180

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

What will this new educational activity
accomplish for the farmer?

It is first pertinent to consider what edu-

cation does for a man. It inspires him,
sets him new ideals, makes him a more
vigorous and accurate thinker, gives him
a new fund of information, and develops
him with power. Then the question arises
whether the farm will continue to satisfy
the educated man.
- The two factors, then, are the college on
one hand and the farm on the other. Can
they work together harmoniously for one
common object? -

The part played by the college

It is undoubtedly true that there has
often been a lack of articulation or adjust-
ment between college and farm, in spite of
all their efforts to come together. This lack
is not to be regarded as a shortcoming, but
rather as a stage in the progress of evolu-
tion of a new type of education. It requires —
time to work out an educational system
that will adequately meet its ends, and
probably in no other direction is this so

181

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

true as in agricultural education: for agri-
culture is exceedingly complex; it rests on
a multitude of sciences and arts, and it is
handicapped by centuries of burdensome
tradition. Agricultural education in this
country, as an organized enterprise, is not
yet half a century old; and half a century
is none too long for the fitting of the ground
and the planting of the seed.

The leading colleges of agriculture have
changed radically within the last five or
ten years. The colleges fully recognize
their weaknesses; but I find that most of
the critics of them are unaware of the re-
cent work of these institutions. No institu-
tions are now making more substantial
progress than these colleges of agriculture.

The man of special parts has gone to
college. For such men there are always
special opportunities. In the last fifty
years the commercial world has been upset
and reorganized, calling everywhere for
men of ability. The farm has furnished a
remarkable share of these men, for the
farm boy is industrious, frugal, able to
turn his attention to many enterprises. We

182

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

think it strange that the college boy has not
gone back to the farm; it would be stranger
if the men of unusual ability had gone back
to the farm. To capable men the door of
opportunity always opens: they enter.

Another type of youth who has gone to
college is the one who cares for books more
than for affairs. The college satisfies him.
He is willing to remain in an inferior posi-
tion if only he can have access to libraries
and to the company of bookish men. This
is not anomalous, nor even strange. Some
men like cattle; some like steam engines;
some like books. Of course the book man
is not adapted to be a farmer. If he goes
back to the farm, he becomes the ‘‘book
farmer.’’ He has missed his calling and he
has had his day. There is a place in the
world for this man; and this place he is
now finding.

The college may take a man away from
the farm because it opens the world to him
rather than because it unfits him for the
farm. Many of the men who leave the
farm by the college route probably never
would have made good farmers if they had

183

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS)

remained; and it is to the great credit of
farming that it has sent so many good men
and women into the world. I hope that the
open country will continue to contribute its
due proportion of boys and girls to the
cities and the professions.

Much of the teaching also has been book-
ish. It has been the avowed purpose of
teaching to teach by means of books. The
old colleges and academies rested largely
on this idea. The common schools copied
the colleges. The introduction into col-
leges of subjects that have relation to af-
fairs has changed all this. The mechanical
engineer is not educated primarily in books
and mere lectures, but in machines and en-
gineering problems. The teaching of agri-
culture also is similarly changing. More
and more, the students are studying cows
and corn, not studying more or less rele-
vant subjects about cows and corn. The
professors are men of affairs: they are
““nractical.’?’ The consequence is that stu-
dents are put in touch with the actual vital
problems of the farm and the open country.
The college and the farm are now beginning

184

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

to articulate closely. The agricultural sub-
jects are gradually being systematized into
educational form, so that they become a
means of developing real power.

Again, the student usually receives no
training farmward until he enters college.
At that age his sympathies are likely to be
set toward other enterprises. The com-
mon schools have not trained countryward.
So far as they train for college, it is mostly
in the direction of ‘‘arts and sciences’’ or
‘‘letters.’? If the youth is to be trained
countryward, the training should begin be-
fore he is sent to college. These remarks
are well illustrated even in the arithmetie,
which presents chiefly store-keeping, mid-
dlemen, and partnership problems; yet
there are hundreds of indigenous arith-
metical farm problems, the figuring of
which in the public schools would revolu-
tionize agriculture. |

The agricultural college is now teaching
from the farm point of view rather than
from the traditional academic point of
view. It is near the load. It will reach
many persons rather than few. It is ask-

185

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

ing the common schools for help. It is fos-
tering an indigenous agricultural senti-
ment.

The part played by the farm

We may now inquire what the farm does
to help the farm boy. A farmer complained
to me that his son had not come back to the
farm from college. He had worked hard to
retain the farm in order that the son might
have it. It was apparent why the son had
not gone back: the farm was not worthy of
him. There was nothing on that particular
farm that could hold the attention of a
young man whose sensitiveness had been
quickened and whose ambitions had been
stimulated. I should have thought the boy’s
education a failure if he had been content
on that farm. The father, remaining on the
farm, had not realized all this. He had
never thought that the son’s point of view
on most questions would be greatly changed.

Often the college man is no longer content
on the farm because of lack of congenial
associates. There is no one in sympathy
with his new attitude of mind. He is aware

186

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

that he is a subject of silent curiosity and
sometimes even of ridicule. Often there is
no opportunity allowed him on the farm to
work out the new methods and to express
his new ambitions. We have assumed that
the whole burden of responsibility rests on
the agricultural college, but it really rests
in part on the farm. The following state-
ment in one of my replies is pathetic:
‘‘My expectation is to go home eventually,
- provided I can secure permission to make
some few improvements that are essential
for successful farming—for example, a
silo.’’

It is wholly unreasonable for a farmer
who has taken no pains to train his son for
better farming to expect that the college of
agriculture can change all this misdirection
after the young man has reached maturity
and can send him back to work under the
old conditions. Farming has sent more
boys away from the farm than colleges of
agriculture ever have sent away.

187

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Back to the farm

The character of farming is changing
rapidly. It is coming more and more to be
an efficient, profitable, and attractive busi-
ness. With marked exceptions here and
there, in the past we have not given much
consecutive thought to the business—not
nearly as much as the merchant gives to
his business or the doctor to his. It has
been such an ‘‘easy’’ business that un-
trained men could succeed in it. The
change in economic and social conditions
is breaking up the tradition. Farming is
becoming more difficult, and the old meth-
ods must go.

The mere growth of our population will
make more intensive demands on the farm.
We have been skimming the surface of our
farms and sending the produce abroad.
From now on, we must expend all our
energies to feed and clothe our own people
from lands that are no longer new. This
will demand great skill. The ignorant and
rule-of-thumb farmer will be forced out.
In the future only the well-informed and

188

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

efficient-thinking man can succeed; that is,
only the educated man.

The country is to offer other advantages —
to the educated man than merely to be a
good farmer. There are good opportuni-
ties for leadership on public questions—
probably better opportunity and with less
competition than in the great cities. The
very fact that city representation is in-
creasing in the legislatures should make
the able country representative more of a
marked man. The growth of the institute
movement, of the grange and other rural
organizations, gives fresh opportunity to
develop leadership of a high order.

It seems to me that, by the very nature
of the progress we are making, the college
man must go to the farm. In fact, college
men have been going back from the begin-
ning of the agricultural education move-
ment. Statistics show that a very large
percentage actually have returned to farm-
ing, and this in spite of the fact that cities
have been growing with marvelous rapid-
ity, and that the whole system of agricul-
tural colleges and experiment stations has

189

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

been developing and calling for men. Con-
sidering the limitations under which the
agricultural colleges have developed, with-
out sympathy, with the indifference and
sometimes the opposition of educators,—
the very men who should have known bet-
ter,—with wholly inadequate funds, it is
little less than marvelous what they have
accomplished within a generation. It is
probable that the proportion of students
of the leading agricultural colleges who
now engage in agricultural pursuits is
greater than that of students of colleges of
law or of other professional colleges who
follow the profession for which the college
stands. No one now questions the value of
education to a lawyer or physician; why
question its value to a farmer? The edu-
cated man will go back to the farm if he is
fitted to be a farmer.

Should all the students become farmers?

We may now consider another phase of
the subject, whether it is really desirable
that all the students from an agricultural
college shall engage in agricultural pur-

190

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

suits. The first great contest of the agri-
cultural college was to convince the public,
particularly the agricultural public, that
higher education is needed for agriculture.
That contestisnow merely a memory. The
second epoch is now on—whether agricul-
tural and country-life subjects can be
made the means of educating a man
broadly, independent of the particular vo-
cation that he is to follow. In other words,
shall agricultural education be severely
technical and professional or shall it be
broadly educational? It is evident that
these subjects are considered to have ex-
cellent training and disciplinary value
from the fact that most of the states, ter-
ritories, and provinces in North America
have now taken some kind of official action
looking toward the introduction of agricul-
tural subjects into the common schools.
The common public schools do not teach the
professions and trades. The result of
good industrial education is to put the
pupil into contact with his own problem, to
place him near his work, to develop his cre-
ative and constructive instincts, to give his
191

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

schooling purpose and meaning, to awaken
a living sympathy with the moving ques-
tions of the time, to fit him to live. The
whole trend of education is to put the
scholar into the actual work of the world;
therefore nothing can prevent the intro-
duction of agricultural topics into the
schools except a fundamental change in
our point of view on the needs and prog-
ress of civilization.

I well remember the efforts, in my college
days, to try to account for every stu-
dent that had passed through an agricul-
tural college as engaged in agriculture.
We shall soon be equally proud of every
graduate of such a college who turns out
to be a useful citizen in any walk in life, in
country or city.

We need an enlightened public sentiment
on the broad questions of agriculture and
country life. These questions concern the
whole people. The colleges of agriculture
are the very institutions that should spread
this intelligence in all the pursuits and pro-
fessions.

We must remember, also, that not all the

192

THE COLLEGE AND FARMING

farm boys will be needed on the farm. We
need better farmers rather than a greater
number. We have farmers enough at pres-
ent, perhaps still too many. The colleges
of agriculture are charged not alone with
the responsibility of developing agriculture
as a pursuit but of helping to forward rural
civilization.

3. THE SUMMARY

The best answer to the question as to the
influence of the college of agriculture is
to come from a general understanding of
the situation of our industries, rather than
from inquiries into particulars.

The agricultural industries are rising
into commanding positions. Every one
seems to be aware that agriculture is mak-
ing great progress. Now, all progress in
the arts and industries rests on knowledge
and the imparting of knowledge; in this
case, it rests very largely on the work of
experiment stations and colleges. The
work of these institutions, accumulating
slowly and methodically, has leavened the

18 193

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

lump. If there is an agricultural problem,
these institutions are to make the heaviest
contributions toward the solving of it.
Now and then, pieces of this great body of
work are hit upon by a magazine writer as
‘“discoveries,’?’ and he runs wild about
them; but the real advance is the result of
small accretions. With all the awakened
interest and the exploiting of individual
instances, the townsman is not yet aware
of the tremendous rise in the tone and
efficiency of the entire agricultural indus-
try, which may well be likened to the
gradual elevation of a geological stratum
of continental extent. At the same time,
the agricultural population is retaining its
old-time vigor, independence, and native
philosophy. The student who enters: this
field will most assuredly not succeed unless
he has good talents and is well trained and
properly estimates the problem; but it is
nevertheless perfectly evident not only that
educated men can succeed in agricultural
arts, but that in time this type of man will
be the only one who can hope for the best
results.

194

CoLLEGE Men as F'anm MANAGERS

“ HAVE a farm of about two hundred
acres near that came to me from
my father. It has fairly good buildings,
is near a good local market, and should be
a good dairy farm. The present tenant,
who is honest and faithful, runs it in the
old way; and although it is no expense to
me, and sometimes turns a fair profit, the
place is not my ideal of what a farm should
be. It seems to me that I ought to change
superintendents, and I thought that among
the graduates from your college there
might be some good young man whom you
could recommend. I pay my man $30 per
month the year round, and he has a small
garden plot and a cow, and gets his fire-
wood on the place. I would be willing to
pay a little more than this for a man who
was scientifically trained and has had ex-
perience, or I might let him work the place
on shares.”’

195

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

1. THE PROBLEMS INVOLVED

This kind of communication is typical of
many that come to me with requests for
college men to take charge of farms. Very
often it is a worn-out or run-down place
that is in need of a manager, and the owner
is willing to let the man have half the earn-
ings if he is successful in bringing it into a
profitable condition. In some cases, the
owner is not able to find any one who knows
the place to rent it, and he is obliged to
look abroad for a manager.

There is such widespread misunder- |
standing of the problems involved in these
questions that I cannot refrain from invit-
ing my reader to a discussion of the merits
of the case. There must be a complete
readjustment of ideas in respect to the re-
muneration that educated men are to re-
ceive in agriculture, and it is time that we
face the question. I understand, of course,
that a graduate of any institution may be
glad to work for a time merely for experi-
ence, but of this I am not now speaking: I

196

FARM MANAGERS

am considering the remuneration for man-
agers.

Outlook of students on the question

In order to ascertain the expectations of
students themselves as to their value to an
employer, I addressed a letter of inquiry
to the several hundred students in the Col-
lege of Agriculture at Cornell University.
I asked what kind of position or employ-
ment the student desired on graduation,
what wages or salary he thought he would
be fairly worth, and why he put the value
of his services at such figure. I had 135
replies, coming from regular four-year
men, one-year or two-year specials, and
three-months’ winter-course students.

Of this number, forty-two desired to be-
come farm managers, eighteen of them
being four-year men, thirteen of them spe-
cials, and eleven winter-course students.
Most of the men, in all classes, were
brought up on the farm, and the others had
had more or less farm experience. The
sums that they specify in every case are
for the first year of service, with expecta-

197

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

tion that promotion may come if they are
successful. These sums are not merely
what is blindly hoped for, but are sug-
gested by what college-mates and others
before them have been able to secure in the
way of remuneration in various kinds of
business.

The pay expected by the eighteen four-
year men on graduation, for farm man-
agership, ranges from $700 to $2000 per
year, and most of the men expect to receive
more or less subsistence in addition.
The average salary for the eighteen is
$977. It is interesting to compare these
figures with those of seventeen four-year
men who desire to become teachers, or to
enter government service, in which salary
schedules are already established. The
range of salary expected by these persons
is from $600 to $1500, with an average of
$987. In these cases, no subsistence is ex-
pected in addition to salary, except such as
may be included in the traveling expenses
of government agents. The pay expected
by those students who are preparing to be
farm managers on the whole exceeds that

198

FARM MANAGERS

expected by those who desire to teach or to
enter the public service. Those who desire
to teach or to engage in government work
usually look to the opportunity to under-
take investigation as the chief ultimate
reward, although many of them expect to
engage in the profession only temporarily,
until they can secure means to purchase or
equip a farm. All the farm-manager stu-
dents expected eventually to manage or
work farms of their own.

Of the one-year and two-year special stu-
dents, thirteen desire to become farm man-
agers, at pay ranging from $420 to $1000,
and an average of $720. They expect, as
do all farm managers, that a good part of
the daily supplies can be got directly from
the farm without money cost to them. Of
these special students, nine would be teach-
ers or experimenters, with salaries ranging
from $600 to $1500, with an average of
about $1000.

The eleven winter-course men who would
be managers of farms, desire pay ranging
from $480 to $1000, with an average of
about $700. Some of the winter-course stu-

199

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

dents are properly high-price men because
they are mature and have had much prac-
tice, and they come to college to supple-
ment their experience-knowledge.

These salaries are all within reason, and
they must be paid if good men are to be se-
cured. The modern farm business must
compete with the public service and the
schools and with commercial organizations
if it is to secure men of equal qualifications.
Those farms that cannot pay such sums
are not expected to compete: they are not
in the managership grade; they must be
run on the family proprietorship plan, and
of these I am not now speaking.

Students’ replies

The replies to my question as to the rea-
son for stating the given figures of value of
services, fall under six categories:

1. The student considers himself to be
worth to his employer the full amount
of the pay that he mentions.

2. One cannot afford to give his services
for less than these figures after hav-

200

FARM MANAGERS

ing gone to the expense of a course of
special training and having lost the
money value of his services in the ef-
fort. If farm managerships cannot
pay these wages, itis not worth while
to train oneself for them.

3. Farm managers should receive as
good pay as their classmates of only
equal ability who teach or enter gov-
ernment service, or who engage in
other professions or occupations.

4, The amount of investment in a thor-
oughly good farm should demand
such a proportion of the working
capital to be expended on manager-
ship.

5. The men would expect to earn similar
amounts if they had good farms of
their own.

6. The manager must have sufficient
remuneration to enable him to live in
a way that befits an educated and cul-
tivated man.

The reader may be interested to read
some of the answers on this point (‘‘why do
201

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

you put your services at this figure?’’).
These are some of the replies:

‘An expert in other branches has a right to
expect a good salary, so why should not a man
who has spent four years specializing in agricul-
tural studies and practical work?’’

‘‘T think that the above figures [$1000 to
$1200] are about right because a person, after
four years’ training, ought to be in a position
to earn that amount. Even if an individual
did not study at a college, but started immediately
in some commercial enterprise, it is quite prob-
able that he would be making as much as this
and perhaps more. Why then should any one
with special knowledge of any sort be his in-
ferior in wage earning, if the branch which he
has taken up is a profitable one?’’

‘*It requires at least $3000 (even to a labor-
ing student if we take his time into considera-
tion) to obtain a college education. This in-
cludes the money actually expended and also the
value of four years at ordinary wages. To
this we must add the gain to mental efficiency
also. I have always lived and labored on a
farm and am acquainted with the practical side.
My vacations are also spent there. I am taking
as general a course as possible. My object in

202

FARM MANAGERS

becoming a superintendent is not only to enable
me to purchase a farm of my own, but to become
as efficient as possible as a farmer. With this
end in view, it will be to my advantage to work
as conscientiously for my employer as it would
be for myself alone. Taking these things all
into consideration, I think $1000 would not be
too high a salary to demand as a beginning.”’

‘*Because I think it would be more profitable

for me to run a farm of my own if I could not
get $1000 a year as superintendent.”’
- “*Beeause I think I can earn it [$1200 to
$1500]. Besides my course here in college, I
have lived and worked all my life on a farm in
a good agricultural region of New York, and I
think I can earn this much by running a farm
for myself.’’

‘Because I was earning half that much [he
asks for $750 the first year, $1500 the second or
third] on a farm before coming to college.’’

‘**T do not know whether I am worth it [$1000],
but I am sure I ean get it.’’

‘Because I think I can make a dairy farm
yield $45 to $50 per cow per year, in addition
to expenses and interest on investment.’’

‘‘T have had five years’ practical experience
on an up-to-date farm paying $3000 per year;
have had a business-college education; am now

203

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

in college here; know what work is, and am not
afraid of it. I am satisfied I can bring a good
farm to a paying basis on that salary [$1000
to begin with].’’

Winter-course students

From the various winter-courses of
twelve weeks a considerable number of men
20 out as managers, although the larger part
of them return to their own places. The
dairy-course winter students go into the
creameries and cheese factories. They are
factory-men. The value of instruction to
these men is somewhat definitely indicated
by the increase in monthly wages as soon
as they are out. Following are extracts |
from correspondence with the dairy-course
winter students:

A young man who could have done no
better than earn ordinary farm wages took
the winter dairy-course, and on leaving the
dairy school, he secured a position as oper-
ator in a small cheese factory at $50 per
month. The next year his wages were in-
creased to $75 per month, and he has been
offered $85 per month for the year to fol-

204

FARM MANAGERS

low. Another student writes that when he
took charge of his creamery, just after
finishing his twelve weeks’ course, the pa-
trons were badly discouraged. They were
not making as good payments as other
creameries in the vicinity. In a single
season this creamery gained steadily,
month after month, until in August the
patrons were receiving the leading price
for butter-fat. Another student writes
that his wages is $13 per month more than
before he took the winter dairy-course.
Another student has had his wages in-
creased one third within a year. Another
receives $20 more per month. In another
case the salary was more than doubled.

Managers are not ‘‘hired men’’

These various cases, chosen as represen-
tative of many, are given only for the pur-
pose of establishing the fact in the mind
of employers that well-trained men com-
mand more than ordinary farm wages,
whether in the region of superintendents
and managers or in that of factory-men.
It is not to be expected that college men can

205

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

afford to become mere month hands on
farms, except only temporarily when learn-
ing the business. Of course these facts are
recognized by good business men, and the
demand for farm managers from the col-
leges, at good remuneration, is greater
than the supply; but the general public
does not yet seem to realize them.

2. CAN FARMING PAY SUCH SALARIES?

My reader will at once ask whether agri-
culture can pay such salaries or wages as
these; and thereupon we come to the es-
sence of the matter. The truth is that the
college graduate has failed to go back to
the farm in many cases because the farm
has not been worthy of his efforts. We
must remember, also, that the number of
graduates has not been large.

The economic question
We may first consider the plain econom-
ics of the case. One of the common errors
206

FARM MANAGERS

of city men who go into farming is in over-
capitalizing in buildings, on which they ex-
pect a manager to make interest. Even an
expensive country house that has nothing
to do with the farm is often included.
Over-capitalization in barns is nearly as
bad. As much as $300 per cow has been
expended for barns, and for only fairly
good cows at that. This makes a tax of
about $30 per cow per year. If one is ex-
pecting to sell pure-bred stock, he may
sometimes secure a profit on such buildings
because of the advertisement that they
furnish, but not because of their direct effi-
ciency in the business.

On the other hand, there is often too low
an investment in productive capital. If the
total farm capital is wisely invested, one
may expect a good manager to be worth
at least five per cent. of it. The average
farmer, according to Warren, probably
makes a salary of about seven per cent.
above interest and business expenses, be-
sides having the use of a house and such
products as the farm furnishes. If wisely
invested, a capital of $15,000 in land and

207

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

equipment may justify the hiring of a man-
ager for $1000 per year.

The farm itself has a responsibility

In a larger way, however, the difficulty
has lain with the opportunities that have
been opened to a well-trained man. It is
natural and right that a college graduate
should enter the line of work that pays him
best and is most attractive to him; and it is
the proof of the value of an education by
means of agriculture that it fits a man as
well as other education does. If the college
man were content to accept the low remu-
neration of the hired man or the share-
worker or the ordinary foreman, it would
mean that his course of study had devel-
oped neither power nor ideals.

The farmer himself must meet the situa-
tion. The institutions are beginning to do
their part. The leading agricultural col-
leges are now so well established, and are
teaching in such direct and applicable
ways, that they are creating a body of abil-
ity and sentiment touching country life that
has never been known before. This ability

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FARM MANAGERS

and sentiment is bound to express itself.
The influence of these colleges and experi-
ment stations will surely remake agricul-
ture and redirect it.

This redirection will not show itself in
increasing the productiveness of the earth
alone, although this must be the funda-
mental effort and result. It must consist
as well in reorganizing the business or
commercial interests of agriculture, and in
a radical change in the ideals and modes
of living. We shall be able to increase the
profitableness of farming when we have
learned to apply our science, and to or-
ganize it as a part of good business sys-
tems. We are now in the epoch of the
admiration of scientific fact itself, as if
the mere knowledge of the laws underlying
good crop and animal production can make
a good farmer.

The only salvation for agriculture is
that it rise to meet the college man. This
is not because the college man is infallible
or the college final, but merely because his
practice is to be rational, his abilities well
directed, and his ideals cultivated. It does

14 209

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

not follow that all farmers must be college-
bred, but it must be true that the well-
schooled man, other things being equal,
must have the advantage in the long run.

I do not mean by these remarks to imply
that college men have not returned to the
farm, for this would be distinctly untrue;
but I must urge that it is as fairly incum-
bent on the farm to bring the young men
back as on the college to send them back.
Education by means of agriculture is ac-
tive and constructive: if the farm is to
attract the college man, it must be some-
thing more than passive and traditional.

Neither must it be inferred, on the other
hand, that the farming business is not now
rising ; for this also would be a great error.
But, except in isolated instances here and
there, the business has not yet evolved to
the point of full satisfaction to a college-
trained man. The present evolution is
being forced by great economic changes
and large movements of populations, and
some of the conspicuous non-adaptations of
farming (of which the so-called ‘‘aban-
doned farms’’ is one) are evidences of it;

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FARM MANAGERS

but there must be a conscious reconstruc-
tive tendency before the country will hold
the well-schooled man in great numbers.

The reconstructive movement

This constructive tendency must arise
largely from the college man himself, using
the term college man broadly for all those
who have been strongly influenced by the
college point of view, whether actual stu-
dents in colleges or not. There will soon be
enough of these men to create public senti-
ment and to set new standards in country
living. They are beginning to be felt in
agricultural societies and in the gradual
redirection of rural institutions. It is not
essential to this sentiment that all these
men live on farms. The point is, that a
new ideal of country life is rising as the
result of facts that have been discovered
and the new purposes that have been set in
motion. What I have in mind is something
very different from the kind of wonder-
farming that is pictured in some of the
current book and periodical writing, and
which is founded chiefly on the ‘‘discover-

211

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

ies-of-science’’ notion. J hope that we
may have vision of something more real
and fundamental than this: we look for
something structural.

3. HOW SHALL THE INEXPERIENCED
COLLEGE MAN SECURE A FARM TRAINING?

I have been speaking of college men who
are well qualified, by experience and study,
to become farm managers. These men are
comparable, in experience, with graduates
of law schools who have had some years’
experience in a lawyer’s office or with
graduates of medical schools who have
had hospital practice and more. Many of
them have had farm apprenticeship, and
have the age, business training and judg-
ment that fit them for independent work.

There are other agricultural college
men, however, of equal ability, who have
not had farm training. What opportunities
shall be provided for such men, in our
scheme of education, to enable them to ac-
quire experience? Here the farm itself

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FARM MANAGERS

must cooperate with the college, and far-
mers carry a natural responsibility to con-
tribute to this end.

The graduate of a college of law reads
law for a time before he enters practice;
the graduate in architecture enters an
architect’s office; the graduate in medicine
engages in hospital service; the graduate
in mechanics enters a shop to learn the
business ; yet it is expected that the gradu-
ate in agriculture will be able at once to
assume full responsibility for a big busi-
ness, and he is censured if he makes a mis-
take. The trouble is that there are yet no
adequate opportunities in this country for
the graduate in agriculture to learn the
business or to test himself, if he needs such
test, as there are for other students. Far-
mers do not take students on such a basis.
In some of the European countries, pro-
vision is made for this farm training on
actual farms.

Most farms do not properly instruct
the boys even before sending them to
college. Farm practice should be learned
at home, not at college. The net result is

213

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

that while much is expected of the student
in agriculture, little opportunity is afforded
him in the way of any training that fitly
supplements his college course. The agri-
cultural colleges cannot do their best work
for the farms until the farms come to their
aid. Of no college is so much demanded as
of the agricultural colleges, because they
are called on not only to educate young
men and women, but also to find the ways
of making the farms produce the money
that will enable the young people to go to
college. They are not only educational, but
economic and social agencies.

Persons seem to expect more of gradu-
ates of colleges of agriculture than of those
of other kinds of colleges. They seem to
think that these men will be able at once
to do all kinds of farm work, tell just what
the soil ‘‘needs,’’ know what to do with
animals in health and disease, and in par-
ticular be able quickly to restore a run-
down farm to profitableness and to be
willing to do it ‘‘on shares.’’ Persons do
not seem to realize the fact that agriculture
is a name not for one occupation, but for a

214

FARM MANAGERS

series of many occupations, and every one
of these occupations should require special
training. The average college graduate is
not yet a mature man; he may not have had
much practical experience with more than
one kind of farming, and of course this ex-
perience cannot be gained at college; his
judgment must be developed and proved.

In contrast with these remarks, I ought
to say that certain other persons expect
too little of these college men; or, in other
words, they do not give them sufficient
freedom and opportunity. In many cases
they are given the title of manager, but not
the power of manager. They may have no
more opportunity for initiative than a good
hired man. The matter is all the worse
when, as very often happens, the employer
is not himself a thorough farmer. It is not
to be expected that an energetic young col-
lege man, who wants to practise what he
has learned, will be content or will work to
best advantage if he is obliged to proceed
under minute daily orders. He expects to
assume responsibility, and he should be
allowed this privilege just as rapidly as he

215

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

shows himself to be capable of it. Persons
who employ a manager must be prepared
to give up the month-hand idea when they
engage him. |

There is still another phase of the sub-
ject to be mentioned: it takes time to bring
‘a run-down farm into profitable produc-
tiveness, and it is very frequently the run-
down farm that the employer desires to
put in the hands of a manager. No man is
able to overcome seasons, or to change
the underlying processes of nature. The
problems must be worked out gradually.
Farming is not the making of good crops in
some one year: it is securing the average
performance of a piece of land through a
series of years. A run-down soil cannot be
renovated and revived in the way that we
repair a house. I am convinced that the
time element is not enough considered by
many persons who employ managers, and,
as a result, the manager may be discharged
before a rational course of action can come
to natural maturity.

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FARM MANAGERS

4, REVIEW

I have made the discussions in this chap-
ter because I am convinced, from a consid-
erable experience, that these things need to
be said in order to put the subject before
the people on its merits and to correct mis-
apprehensions. In other occupations and
professions there is a form of experience
and custom by which we determine salaries
and wages, and measure the performance
of the man. In the reorganizing of agri- .
culture, we yet have no such standards.

A course of college instruction in agri-
culture, however complete, cannot be
expected to do more for a man than a
comparable course in law or medicine or
mechanics can do for its students; perhaps
it can do even less, so far as practical re-
sults are concerned, because every farm
business is a very local problem. Yet a
man should be much better prepared for
practical farm-manager work by a college
training than the same man would be with-
out it. The competitions and complexities

217

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

of agricultural work are now so many that
the very best training is required to enable
a man to meet them with any degree of suc-
cess. Untrained men are hopelessly handi-
capped, and the disability will become more
apparent as time goes on. The college man
needs training in business after he leaves
college; and he must learn the particular
problems of the one enterprise that he is
ealled on to handle. It is time that he re-
ceive help, cooperation, and encouragement
at the period when he is trying to get a
hold. The farm must actively codperate
with the college in the training of farmers.

I hope that I have been able to indicate,
although imperfectly, a type of obligation
to the student in agriculture that is sel-
dom discussed, and to suggest to my reader
that we need a redirection of our attitude
toward the value of the services of these
young men and the kind of encouragement
that they should receive.

218

ee

sto ot eee

Tuer CoLLEGE oF AGRICULTURE AND
THE STATE

HE natural centers of free and spon-
| taneous leadership on rural ques-
tions in the various states are the colleges
of agriculture, that draw their support
conjointly from the state and the nation.
If any of these colleges are not taking
the leadership, they are not meeting their
opportunity or carrying their natural
responsibility.

These institutions should in the nature of
the case be the great leaders in country
life, because their work is founded on
scholarship and is (or may be) wholly free
from political or partisan domination and
control. If any of them are in educational
bondage, the fault lies not with the system.

If the colleges have not met all expecta-

219

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

tions, it is largely because their facilities
have been almost trivial as compared with
the work they have been expected to do.
For years they have been praying for
funds and freedom to enable them to do
their work. Whether they will in the
future accomplish all that is expected of
them will depend as much on the people as
on the professors; in fact, in the end the
people have control.

These colleges are expensive. They are
the most expensive of all colleges, because
they must do so very many things, be pre-
pared to give advice on every conceivable
subject of country life, have so much land,
so many different kinds of live-stock, such
extensive orchards and grounds, reach so
many special industries, and give such per-
sonal and practical instruction to their
students. This is exactly the opposite of
the prevailing notion, at least until very
recently. There are still some persons who
think that a college of agriculture should
be practically self-supporting, because it
engages in farming; yet I usually find that
such persons have difficulty enough in

220

hs a

COLLEGE AND STATE

making a farm pay as a farm, without ask-
ing it to support teaching and experiments
in the bargain.

These colleges represent the state.
Their general purpose is to aid in devel-
oping the resources of the state, in its
materials, its affairs, and its people. Their
special range is the open country. Their
primary field is to extend those industries
and interests that rest on the producing
power of the land. Their work is construc-
tive. They should strongly influence, and
perhaps even dominate, the agricultural
and country-life work of the public-school
system.

Obligation on the part of the people

It is not merely a set of institutions, com-
peting with other institutions, that we are
founding when we establish a system of
colleges of agriculture. These colleges are
only means or agencies of expanding the
welfare of the commonwealth, and they
should be thought of as a regular part of a
state program. I hear it said that agri-
cultural college men are ‘‘never satisfied’’

221

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

with appropriations, as if the appropria-
tions were requested for the purpose of
self-aggrandizement or merely to enlarge
an institution. I resent this attitude.
Ideally, the responsible officers of a col-
lege of agriculture should not be obliged to
request appropriations. The state gov-
ernment, or other organization represent-
ing society, should acquaint itself with
what things need to be done for agricul-
tural education in the interest of the state
itself and then place the necessary funds
in the hands of those who are capable of
using them wisely and hold these persons
to strict account. A college of agriculture
should not be obliged to secure the funds
with which it may serve the people; it
should be allowed to devote all its efforts
to serving the people. It is the duty of
the responsible head of such a college to
acquaint the people with the needs of their
institution. The college should not with-
hold the knowledge of anything that is
required. Having stated the needs and
requirements, the question of how far the
institution shall be enabled to do its work
222

COLLEGE AND STATE

ought to rest with the people themselves. I
am aware that this may seem to be utopian.
I do not expect that such a condition will
come all at once, but even a partial change
of attitude toward constructive state work
would solve more difficulties than we can
now appreciate, and this change ought not
to be difficult to secure; and the colleges of
agriculture cannot do their best work until
this attitude develops. This will come
when government by influence begins to
pass away. The attitude of the public
toward these questions is wrong.

Different kinds of colleges of agriculture
The scope of any given college of agri-
culture must be determined by the size and
nature of the commonwealth, and the char-
acter of other educational institutions that
have already been established in the state.
When the state has divided its work of
higher education between a university and
a college of agriculture, the development
of the college will necessarily be unlike
that of a college of agriculture that is a
part of the university. When the two are
223

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

separate, it is the obligation of the state
administration so to define the work of
each that harmony and cooperation will
result. Hostility between the two lessens
the efficiency of each. It is particularly
important that neither one of the institu-
tions should become possessed of the idea
that its work is in the nature of the case
more important than that of the other,
either because the one may represent what
is conceived to be the broader education or
because the other may represent what is |
thought to be the more practical and neces-
sary. The province of educational insti-
- tutions is to fight ignorance, not to fight
each other.

There will necessarily be sallewen of
agriculture of differing kinds and grades.
In a small state, the college will natu-
rally be less extensive than in a large
and wealthy state, but it may be none the
less effective for its commonwealth. All
the colleges, whether separate or con-
nected, should, of course, be equally free
to develop a wide range of subjects.
Some will become essentially agricultural

224

COLLEGE AND STATE

or country-life universities; we need a few
of this type.

The teaching of agriculture of college
and university grade ought not to be con-
fined to colleges of agriculture. All uni-
versities, at least, on their own account
and for their own best development, will
in time have departments of agriculture, if
they are real universities, as much as they
have departments of language or of en-
gineering. They cannot neglect any fun-
damental branches of learning. There
may be need, also, of a kind of agricultural
work that can best be done in an institution
that is independent of direct state support,
and that is not at once responsible to popu-
lar will.

I propose now to sketch some of the
directions in which an institution of the
agricultural-university class may develop.
I am doing this because the public has not
had its imagination directed to this kind of
an educational equipment.

15 225

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

1. SCOPE OF A HIGHLY DEVELOPED COLLEGE OF
AGRICULTURE

While a college of agriculture is con-
cerned directly with increasing the pro-
ducing power of land, its activities cannot
be limited narrowly to this field. If itis a
large institution, it should stand broadly
for rural civilization. It must include
within its activities such a range of sub-
jects as will enable it to develop an entire
philosophy or scheme of country life.

On the production side, a first-rate col-
lege of agriculture deals with all crops, the
means of growing them and handling them
and of caring for them in health and dis-
ease; and with all domesticated or con-
trolled animals, the means of rearing them
and handling them and of caring for them
in health and disease. The crops include
all plants reared by man from the soil, or
controlled and used by him, as all grains,
all forage, all fibers, all timbers and for-
ests, all fruits and garden vegetables and
flowers, and whatever else in the vegetable

226

n

COLLEGE AND STATE

kingdom he produces or improves by fore-
sight and care to supply the wants of his
fellowmen. The animals include all tamed
mammals and birds, all fish that are reared
and bred, the bees, domestic pets, and all
others that contribute food, fur, pelts, and
other products for the maintenance and
comfort of man.

Aside from this, such a college stands
for the relations of the man to his commu-
nity and to his time. All civilization devel-
ops out of industries and occupations; and
so it comes that agriculture is properly
a civilization rather than a congeries of
crafts. The colleges of agriculture repre-
sent this civilization, in its material, busi-
ness, and human relations. Therefore, they
are not class institutions, representing
merely trades and occupations. The task
before the colleges of agriculture is noth-
ing less than to direct and to aid in devel-
oping the entire rural civilization; and
this task should place those who make them
within the realm of statesmanship.

227

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Three great lines of work

The colleges of agriculture have three
proper lines of work: the regular or ordi-
nary teaching; the discovery of truth, or
research; the extending of their work to
all the people. I mention these in the order
in which they have been recognized. These
colleges are founded on the Land-grant
Act of 1862; the experiment station side
was added in 1887; the extension side is
not yet regularly recognized by Congress,
although it soon must be acknowledged,
but it is established in most of the colleges
to some degree.

All progress and increased efficiency is
conditioned on knowledge of the facts and
laws of nature. It is impossible to have a
good college of agriculture without careful
research work as its basis. Therefore,
every effort must be made to secure able
investigators and to enable them to pursue
their work with perfect freedom, and not
to hold them rigidly merely to problems of
immediately so-called practical impor-
tance.

228

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COLLEGE AND STATE

The extent of special knowledge about
every crop and every kind of animal has
now come to be so great, and so many per-
sons are asking definite questions and
deserve such explicit and careful replies,
that teachers are becoming more and more
cautious about giving advice. This calls for
a greater degree of specialization and con-
sequently many more teachers and experts,
each teacher teaching only that which he
personally knows.

Crops and live-stock

There are nearly one hundred persons on
the staffs of certain colleges of agriculture,
and yet there are not half enough to make
it possible to answer anywhere near all
the questions that are asked by farmers in
person and by letter. There must be spe-
cialists in cereals, potatoes, hay and
forage, the different kinds of fruits, the
different kinds of vegetables, the different
kinds of flower crops, forest crops, nursery
crops, in cattle, sheep, horses and mules,
swine, bees, fish and other aquatic animals,
all the different kinds of poultry. New

999

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

varieties and types of plants must be bred
to adapt crops exactly to special condi-
tions. And all these specialties must rest
on the fundamental sciences of physiology,
physics, chemistry, meteorology, biology,
and the others, all of which must also be
represented by strong teachers. Every
precaution must be taken to develop these
fundamental sciences coordinately with the
application work on the farms. It is now
time for the colleges of agriculture to stand
firmly for a high-class curriculum, even
though all the people are not ready for it.

These subjects must be developed both
as a means of teaching students and for
the purpose of developing the agricultural
productiveness of the state. In order to
illustrate the relation of such effort to the
general economic welfare of the state, I
have chosen examples in New York state.
In other states, other groups of subjects
would come to the fore.

Particular examples of crops and lwe-stock

Nearly all the most important field crops

of New York have been neglected, and no
230

COLLEGE AND STATE

crops have received the study that is re-
quired to enable the grower to get the most
from them. There is always a tendency to
study local crops and specialties, to the
relative exclusion of the great underlying
staples. I cite hay and pasture, live-stock,
forests, and fish as examples.

Grass is the fundamental crop of the
state, as it is of most of the northern
states. Of the 15,599,986 acres of improved
land in farms in New York, 5,154,965 are in
hay and forage, and 4,366,683 acres are in
allother crops. The remainder, 6,078,338, is
probably mostly in pasture. The improved
farm land is, therefore, approximately

One-third in hay

One-third in pasture

One-third in all other crops.
The value of the grass crop is no less strik-
ing. The hay crop is worth as much as all
the dairy products. It is worth nearly as
much as all other crops combined. It is
worth over five times as much as all the
orchard products. We have no estimate of
the values of pastures, but the hay and
pasture crops are undoubtedly worth more

231

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

than all the animals and animal products
sold, and are worth more than all the other
plants or plant products. They constitute
considerably over one-third of the total
products of New York farms. The value
of hay has increased 66 per cent. since
these figures were taken by the last census.
In spite of these facts, New York and other
states have done comparatively little to aid
in grass production. There is as much op-
portunity for improvement in grass pro-
duction as there is in fruit production.
There should be at least one man to give
his entire time to a study of the hay ques-
tion. He should conduct large numbers of
cooperative experiments and should study
the great hay crop from seed-sowing to
marketing. This is largely an extension
enterprise but will, at the same time, result
in much increased knowledge. One man
should devote his entire time to the pasture
problem. He should make a study of pres-
ent pasture conditions throughout the
state and should try the new kinds of
grasses, aS brome grass, in the different
regions. There should be codperative
232

COLLEGE AND STATE

pasture experiments in which different
mixtures and treatments are used and in
which the results are measured by pastur-
ing each area separately. Both of these
_lines of work would soon require a larger
number of persons working on them, if the
situation were met adequately.

There is no point in developing meadows
and pastures unless live-stock is produced
to consume the crop. In fact, the pos-
sibility of developing them depends to a
great extent on the animals themselves.
The northeastern states need-to give new
and greater attention to the general live-
stock interests, not only for the profit that
may come from the stock itself, but also
that better forms of diversified agriculture
may be established and that fertility of
lands may be maintained. When the fun-
damental crop is by nature grass, a highly
developed animal husbandry must be a
necessary part of the agriculture. Such
crops and such plans of farm management
must be encouraged as will make it pos-
sible to feed the live-stock profitably. The
East has lost its supremacy in sheep. In

233

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

1850, there were about three and a half-mil-
lion sheep in New York. There has been
a continuing and marked decline in the
number, until in 1900 there were less than
one million; and yet all the natural condi-
tions for a good sheep husbandry are pres-
ent. The rearing of horses should be an
important part of farm business in the
Kast. More swine and more beef cattle are
needed. Not only this, but poultry and
dairy interests should have increased at-
tention.

Another great cropping interest that
needs to be developed is the forests. Tim-
ber is as much a crop as corn or potatoes.
It should be planted, cared for, and har-
vested. In the last census year, New York
led all the states in the value of farm-forest
products. The value was about $7,500,000
worth. More than one-third of the state is
in timber or woodlots. Very little of this
vast area is yielding anywhere near a full
crop. The ordinary forest is half waste.
Nearly every large farm in most parts of
the northeastern states has its woodlot, as
it has its meadow, its pasture, or its wheat

234

COLLEGE AND STATE

field. Farmers should raise the larger
part of their farm lumber and timber, as
they should raise their own meat and but-
ter and fruit and silage. It is all the more
remarkable that the farm forests do not
receive attention since they exert great in-
fluence in maintaining the sources and con-
trolling the flow of streams, in preventing
floods, in protecting game, and in making
the country attractive. Their value ex-
tends far beyond the particular farm on
which they stand. The proper destiny of
much of the so-called ‘‘abandoned’’ farm
land is to grow forests. Much of the re-
mote and agriculturally unprofitable land
should be owned by townships and counties
(or by the state), and be used for forest.
In time these lands should return a fair
revenue to the communities.

We think of farming as a dry-land busi-
ness. Itis a fact, however, that an acre of
water may be made to yield more food than
an average acre of land. There are tens of
thousands of acres of fresh water in many
states, and great expanses of salt water.
In time we shall cultivate these fresh waters

239

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

and the sea shores. The man who owns a
lake or pond, or has the use of one, will in
the future find it to be valuable agricul-
tural property. We shall breed domestic
varieties of fish as we do of pigs or poul-
try. Some of the European peoples are
doing this now. Weare still stocking lakes
and streams largely with game fish for
sportsmen. As competition increases,
however, ponds must be stocked in the
same spirit as pastures are stocked. We
have passed the hunting stage with cattle
and sheep. We shall come to a scientific
development and utilization of water fields.
We shall not allow people to poison and
pollute the ponds and lakes any more than
the wheat fields. After we stock the ponds
and streams with young fish, we shall pro-
vide ways whereby the fish may live and
thrive, as we till and fertilize corn or
any other crop. This means the devel-
opment of natural fish forage and also
such control as will maintain the balance
of nature. We know practically nothing
about fish forage and the means of growing
it in streams and lakes. We have estab-
236

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COLLEGE AND STATE

lished experiment stations for land crops,
but not for water crops. Whenever waters
are impounded, the possibilities of making
them breeding grounds for food fish should
also be considered. It is probable that
other aquatic animals than fish, or semi-
aquatic ones, will be regularly grown under
eontrol in time; and it is not too much to ex-
pect that we may find new uses for much of
our marsh land. There are many aquatic
plants that are of value; but all I aim
to do at present is to challenge attention to
an undeveloped line of agricultural effort.
In developing all our great agricultural
interests, we are also providing the very
best means of educating students through
the knowledge that is gained; and to edu-
cate young men and women by means of the
common affairs of country life, is the pri-
mary object of a college of agriculture.

Household subjects

But the kinds of crops and of animals
and the fundamental subjects in sciences
and language and arts, do not cover all the
teacherships that a good college of agri-

237

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

culture must have. While the home is the
center or pivot of our civilization, it is the
last thing to be taught in schools. We
have worked out better plans for feeding
and rearing live-stock than for humans.
The federal government may investigate
diseases of sheep in the various states, but
it may not investigate diseases of men and
women. The whole range of household
subjects must be taught, and if so, there
must be specialists in food, sanitation,
nursing, house-building, house-furnishing,
and similar subjects; and all these depart-
ments of knowledge must be housed,
equipped and maintained. It is probably
more important that we now attack the
home side of country life than any other
phase of the work.

The mechanical side

All the manufacture phases of country
life must be developed. The dairy depart-
ments of the colleges represent one of these
phases. All the subjects relating to the
canning, drying, and preserving of fruits
are practically untouched in the colleges,

238

ee le ™. “2a Lm o

a Es a > eae ee ee -

COLLEGE AND STATE

and yet nothing is more important to the
development of our fruit and vegetable-
gardening interests. The curing of meats
and home manufacture of animal products
must be taught; and also the whole great
question of refrigeration and storage.
The whole subject of mechanical power
and of the best use of machinery must be
developed on the American farm. With
all our knack for invention, we are not the
foremost people in the application of small
power to farm work and housework. The
necessity of economizing human labor must
itself force the use of gasoline and other
engines, small water power, electrical
power, and others, on thousands and mil-
lions of farms; and the use of such ma-
chines will set new ideals into the minds of
men. With the development of long-dis-
tance transmission of electric energy, it
will be increasingly possible for such
power to be diverted to farm uses; and yet
we do not seem to be giving much attention
to this subject, although the development
is coming in Germany and other countries.
Every good farm must in time have its own
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THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

power ; but we must first train up a race of
mechanic-minded farmers. Even the com-
mon farm machinery is not usually under-
stood by those who use it, nor, with all our
invention of machines for the easier and
more wholesale farm practices, have we
yet developed farm machinery to anywhere
near its possible extent of perfection or
necessity. The burden of household labor
is to be solved in part by better mechanical
contrivances. Colleges of mechanic arts
cannot be asked to develop this subject for
the farms, for they have their legitimate
professional work; and, moreover, the
problems of farm mechanics are largely
agricultural. The subject must be devel-
oped as part of a constructive philosophy
of rural life.

Engineering questions

Similar remarks may be made of some
of the applications of engineering. The
lay-out of the farm, the running of levels,
drainage, irrigation, the making of farm
bridges, the construction of farm roads
and of highways, and the development of a

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COLLEGE AND STATE

rational point of view on engineering prob-
lems as they affect country life, are all of
the first importance. The engineer is to
exert tremendous influence on the develop-
ment of our rural civilization, playing a
part that we little realize to-day. The
whole system of highways and byways will
be evolved, as one part of the development
of our natural resources. This evolution
must depend in good part on the attitude of
the farming people. I am afraid that we
are in danger of making the mistake of
developing our highways only from trans-
ported material, as we have continued to
be in error in depending for fertility on
material mined in some other part of the
globe. The best philosophy of farm life is
to develop the business directly from na-
tive home resources; this must be equally
true of roads, at least of the greater num-
ber of them. What we now very much
need is knowledge of how to build service-
able highways with the dirt and other
material of the neighborhood. A good-
roads school could well be added to a col-
lege of agriculture. A course of at least
16 241

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

three months might be offered to all high-
way commissioners and overseers in the
state, in order that they might be able to
carry out the instructions of engineers and
properly to care for the roads under their
charge; and laws should be so framed
as to allow any township to send such off-
eer to the school. The instruction should
include not only simple road-making ques-
tions, but such economic and general
questions as the relation of highways to
local taxation and agricultural affairs, the
proper distribution of highway service, and
the general development of the community
and state. A state cannot afford to ex-
pend large sums for highways until the
local officers are properly trained for their
duties. The whole subject is broadly an
agricultural question, and the instruction
should be sympathetically tied tc other
agricultural instruction.

Farm architecture
The point of view on the proper kinds
of buildings for the rural country must be
radically changed before such buildings
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COLLEGE AND STATE

can be perfectly adapted to their uses or
country life be wholly attractive. We are
so accustomed to our buildings, both in
country and city, that we do not think to
challenge them; and yet there are rela-
tively very few buildings in the world that
are either good to look at or are well
adapted to their ends. All architecture is
either good or bad, whatever the building
costs: it must have good proportions and
exactly meet the needs for which it is con-
structed. Certain boxes appeal to us in
their attractive shape, yet we forget that
shape and proportion are the first con-
siderations in the good looks of buildings.
All the sanitary waterworks and other
conveniences of modern residences must
come into country districts, and this will
eall for new plans of buildings. How to
build a house to save steps, to cause it to
be sanitary and cheerful, to insure good
construction, to make it comfortable and
durable, are questions of careful planning;
and the more we build by merely copying
other buildings or depending on the wit of
the carpenter, the longer will we continue
243

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

to be held by tradition. The silent and
continuing influence of the building in
which it lives, has a powerful effect on the
child. The proper building of barns,
dairies, stables, creameries, poultry houses,
and all the other constructions of the farm,
must now receive expert attention. The
experts cannot be practising architects,
because the fees in farm-building are in-
sufficient; the regular architects do not
study these questions. The experts must
come from the colleges of agriculture or
other public institutions. Within a genera-
tion, the greater part of all the farm build-
ings in North America should be rebuilt.
Who is going to direct the work?

The farms of a college of agriculture
should have a number of model farm
houses of different cost, with the grounds
properly laid out and planted, as examples
to the people of the state.

The landscape

Related to this is the development of the
landscape features of the open country,—
the proper subdivision and lay-out of

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COLLEGE AND STATE

farms, the placing of buildings for best
effect, the plan and planting of all yards
and roadsides and school grounds and
church grounds, the preservation and im.
provement of scenery. All this is neces-
sary to make the country as attractive and
as satisfying as the city. It is also an
economic question. Plans are already
under way in a few of the states for the
parking of the entire area of the common-
wealth in such a way as to make all parts
accessible, to develop what is best in every
part, to preserve all good natural features.
This idea will extend to every part of the
country in time, developing local patriot-
ism and increasing the values of property.
Scenery as well as soil can be capitalized,
and made to yield a profit. The increase
in values of farm property is coming
largely as a result of good roads and gen-
eral improvement, rather than merely
from better farming.

The leadership for this general improve-
ment work should be expected to come
from a college of agriculture. I would not
appropriate the professional work of the

245

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

landscape architect; but he does not look
for clients among the working farmers, and
he could not secure fees enough to make it
worth the while to devote his life to strictly
rural work. Yet all the persons on the
land are entitled to a developed point of
view on surroundings and scenery.

Farm management

All the technical special work can be
tied together by a department of farm
management, which develops in the stu-
dents’ minds a business philosophy or sys-
tem. There is great need of information
on the planning and lay-out of farms.
Even in so simple a matter as the arrange-
ment of fields, there is need for much study
and experiment. The whole cropping
scheme on the farms should be overhauled.
Special investigations should be made of
farming systems for hill lands, now that
the older farming is being driven from
these regions. The entire subject of farm
accounting must be attacked in a new way.
The ordinary bookkeeping will not apply.
In visiting practically every farmer in one

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COLLEGE AND STATE

of the counties of an eastern state, not one
man was found who knew how much it cost
him to produce milk or to raise any of his
crops.

If the different courses in a highly devel-
oped college of agriculture are not tied to-
gether, the student is likely to lose himself
in details and to fail to construct for him-
self a business plan that will work.

The human problems

The people themselves and the affairs
whereby they live must also be studied.
These are economic and social questions,
concerned with the whole problem of how
the people organize their lives and their
business. On the economics side are the
great questions of taxation, distribution of
products, marketing, business organiza-
tion, and the like. The whole relation of
the man and woman to the community in
respect to social intercourse, schools,
churches, societies, the broad influence of
telephones and roads and machinery on
rural life, the social results of immigration,
the scheme of rural government, the poli-

247

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

cies of cooperation in a thousand ways,
and, in short, the structure of rural society,
constitute a special field of inquiry. For
cities many of these questions have been
- studied with care, and measures of relief
have been set on foot when they were
found to be needed; but in the country
these great human problems are practi-
eally untouched. There is as much need of
an agricultural application of economic
and social studies as there is need of an
agricultural application of chemistry; in
fact, there is greater need of it, for at the
bottom all civilization is but a complex of
these human questions.

Training teachers

If the public schools must teach persons
how to live, the effort will call for a com-
plete change in their methods and point of
view. New teachers must be trained. We
cannot expect any very great progress by
merely adding new work to old methods or
asking present teachers to take on a new
philosophy of service. The whole school
system must be redirected and recon-

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COLLEGE AND STATE

structed from the bottom up. This means °
that in rural districts, pupils shall be edu-
eated by means of rural subjects as well as
by other means. Of course, all this new
effort will come slowly (we could not as-
similate it in any other way), but we must
prepare for it, nevertheless. At least a
few of the colleges of agriculture should
be enabled to establish normal depart-
ments so that they can contribute to pre-
pare teachers to handle the agricultural
work in the public schools. There is no
greater work now before these colleges.

The outside or extension work

What I have thus far said has referred
mostly to the inside or so-called academic
work of the colleges of agriculture. I now
call attention to the outside or extension
work.

1J have stated my convictions as to the means of train-
ing such teachers in a pamphlet ‘‘ On the training of per-
sons to teach agriculture in the public schools,” published
by the U. S. Bureau of Education, Washington, 1908.
This also suggests the relationship between training-
schools and the colleges of agriculture. A discussion of
the point of view in teaching may be foundin ‘‘ The Nature-
Study Idea”’ (third edition; Macmillan).

17 249

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

By extension work, I mean all kinds of
teaching with the people at their homes
and on the farms. The three great phases
or sides of agricultural college work, as I
have said (page 228), are the experiment
or research, the regular college teaching,
and the outside teaching. The college
teaching must be founded directly on the
knowledge gained in research, and the ex-
tension work must be founded on both.

A college of agriculture cannot serve the
state as it is capable of doing without en-
gaging in many kinds of extension work.
It ought to serve farmers who cannot go
to college, or who do not know what a col-
lege is. The college must be taken to the
people. All state colleges should become
a real part of the machinery of society (or
the state), participating directly in all
work for the good of the people, so far as
such work comes within the range of their
subject-matter. The agricultural colleges,
thereby, may express the needs and the
ideals of the people on the land.

Although much extension work of an
agricultural nature has been done, it is

250

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COLLEGE AND STATE

nevertheless weak and fragmentary as
compared with what needs to be accom-
plished. A broad system or plan, national
in its scope, is now needed, to rouse the
entire open country and to set at work the
ferment of new ideas and new practices.

I am not to be understood as saying that
extension work with farm people is the
exclusive province of the colleges of agri-
culture. Other colleges, universities and
schools may engage in it with satisfaction
to themselves and the people, if they are
equipped for the work; and it is always
well to have several points of view on the
same line of effort. The regular colleges
of agriculture are the institutions that are
at present best qualified or equipped for
this form of extension teaching, and it is
to be expected that they will always hold
the leadership in the agricultural phases
of the work. In extension teaching for
farm people, we need a cooperative effort,
conducted on a wide and comprehensive
plan, between the technical and the so-
called liberal sides. :

251

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

Kinds of extension work

Extension work in agriculture includes
all effective personal acquaintanceship
with the farmers of the state; all inspec-
tion of farms that is not legal and police in
character; the giving of advice by corre-
spondence; publication of an educational
nature; cooperation with societies and
organizations; advisory and codperative
work with schools; the organizing of boys’
and girls’ clubs in schools and country
districts; the conducting of reading-
courses for farmers, farmers’ wives and
rural school-teachers; experiments or
demonstrations on farms; running of
‘“‘farm trains’’; holding of ‘‘farmers’
weeks’? and other conventions; lectures,
itinerant schools, and the like; and all
species of helpfulness and advice to the
people on the land. The extension depart-
ment of a college of agriculture should be
a means of arousing the country people,
and then of helping and guiding them. It
will be effective in proportion as it works

202

COLLEGE AND STATE

harmoniously and full-heartedly with all
other agencies for rural progress.

Lectures and traveling teachers

The best vehicle for much of the exten-
sion work is a public lecture-service, and
this service will naturally develop. This
raises the question as to the proper place
for farmers’ institute service. Histori-
cally, the institutes have developed in dif-
ferent ways, some of them issuing from
colleges of agriculture, some of them from
state departments of agriculture, and some
of them from a separate or special organi-
zation. If they were to be developed anew
to-day, they would naturally issue from the
colleges of agriculture, if the colleges in the
different states were capable of handling
them, because they are educational agen-
cies and because the extension enterprise
of the college must on its own account de-
velop similar work. There is a popular
impression that farmers’ institutes will
soon have served their purpose and will
naturally discontinue. I doubt whether

253

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

this is true. It certainly will not be true
when they constitute part of a well-organ-
ized extension-teaching scheme. The na-
ture of their work will change from year
to year, as any other living work changes;
but it will always be necessary to instruct
the farm people at their homes. It will be
increasingly necessary to substitute dem-
onstration and laboratory work for much
of the lecturing. We must develop a new
type of institute man, unlike the college
professor on the one hand and the so-
called practical farmer on the other. These
men must be trained for this kind of public
work, as carefully as other men are
trained to be chemists or engineers. They
should live for at least part of the year on
the land, and they should also be connected
with an institution that can keep them in
touch with the best and latest information.
In other words, they should be farmers as
well as students, and students as well as
farmers. The regular college or experi-
ment-station specialist will be called on
here and there when expert knowledge of
a particular kind is wanted, but his main
254

COLLEGE AND STATE

effort should not be diverted from his reg-
ular work. The institute teacher, in all
the states, will then be chosen with the
same care that a college or experiment
station chooses the members of its staff;
his teaching will be as carefully watched
and supervised. Under these conditions
the institutes will endure.

Teaching on farms

I regard certain kinds of demonstration
work on farms as of the greatest teaching
value, if it is conducted by a good teacher.
Our educational methods have been greatly
improved by the introduction of the labo-
ratory, whereby a student is set at work
with a personal problem. The laboratory
work may be the actual observation and
study of a plant disease or an animal dis-
ease, of a rock, a soil, a physical phenom-
enon, the making of a school-garden, the
making of cheese or butter, the feeding of
a cow or horse, the incubating of eggs,
work in an orchard or greenhouse, the
planning of grounds or buildings, or what-
ever other actual work that it is worth

290

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

while to do under the guidance of a
teacher. Now, a man’s farm is his labora-
tory. No one may direct him how to man-
age his farm; but a good teacher coming
to his place may set him into new lines of
thinking and put him in the way of helping
himself. In a moment of my younger en-
thusiasm I once wrote that every farm in
a state should be visited at least once
each year by a good teacher. My maturer
judgment leads me to expand the statement
to the effect that every farm in every state
should be considered as one part in an
underlying fabric of human evolution, and
that in the interest of society every farm
should ultimately be known to some one
who represents society, to the end that that
farm may be made a more effective unit in
the great plan.

Whenever an agricultural problem is
worked out in the laboratory, its applica-
tion should be at once widely demonstrated
in the field under actual farm or garden
conditions, and this of itself will require
a large corps of high-class men. This will
relieve the continuing demand for local

256

COLLEGE AND STATE

experiment stations. Field laboratories
will need to be established in the localities
until the application of the problem to the
locality is worked out. I think (as I have
said on pages 6, 73) that some of the aid
rendered to special communities and inter-
ests, however, should be paid for directly
by the communities themselves so far as
the services of the expert or agent are con-
cerned.

Teaching on farms I consider, therefore,
to be essential to rural progress. What-
ever has thus far been accomplished in
this kind of teaching is the merest be-
ginning of what a state would profit by.
This kind of teaching will be most effec-
tive when it can follow or be made a part
of the survey or inventory work that I
have advised (page 32).

Local leaders

If a college of agriculture is to extend
itself over the state, it will need to have
local agents or representatives, who will
_ keep the institution informed of the needs
of the locality and be prepared to give

207

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

advice and to look out for the agricultural
welfare of the people. This agent should
be to agricultural interests what the
teacher is to educational interests and the
pastor to religious interests. This type of
local leader has already been set to work
in Canada, and beginnings in an experi-
mental way are also being made elsewhere.

2. THE WORK IS UPON US

All this may seem to be far away to the
philosopher and the dreamer, but the plain
people are now ready. Every college of
agriculture receives requests and demands
from the folks on the farms and in the
rural schools that it cannot adequately
meet; and something must be done to meet
these calls if the rural problem is to find
solution and if farming is to escape from
tradition.

The institutions are even now well de-
voted to working out many such welfare
problems as I have sketched. The ideals
are the product of a few far-seeing persons

258

COLLEGE AND STATE

who have not been in bondage to educational
tradition or pedagogical theory and who
for twenty-five and fifty years have been
trying to make education meet the plain
needs of life. These purposes have been
placed into the institutions by persons who
have seen the farm problem rather than
the college problem.

These colleges of agriculture are forcing
a new definition of education. The institu-
tion does not passively accept students who
come: all persons in the commonwealth are
properly students of a state educational
institution, but very few of them yet have
registered; nor is it necessary that any
great proportion of them should leave
home in order to receive some of the bene-
fits of the institution. It is the obligation
of such an institution to serve all the peo-
ple, and it is equally the obligation of all
the people to make the institution such that
it can exercise its proper functions; and all
this can be brought about without sacri-
ficing any worthy standards of education.

The work of these institutions, therefore,
is not to be judged merely by formalities

259

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

of entrance and curriculum, but by the
character and spirit of the enterprise. They
must of course maintain standards of ad-
ministration and scholarship as high as
those of other institutions, but they must
be allowed to work out their proper con-
tribution to educational progress.

The results of scientific work are begin-
ning to be apparent in the attitude toward
country-life questions. The investigations
have challenged all the old ideas and meth-
ods, and all practices are now in the pro-
cess of becoming rational. The extent of
scientific investigation in the interest of
agriculture is unparalleled in its scope and
organization; this world-wide effort is
bound to work itself out in wholly new and
more effective schemes of life; and when
the scientific or truth-seeking spirit be-
comes dominant in country life, it will
mean the end not only of blind haphazard
in farming but of patronage and ‘‘influ-
ence’’ in government; for it is as neces-
sary that rural government (and all gov-
ernment) be scientific as that agriculture
be scientific. There can never be a good

260

COLLEGE AND STATE

country life until the government of the
open country is founded on fact, evidence,
and reason, and is propagated with the
vigor and confidence of men and women
who have arrived at some degree of mas-
tery of their conditions.

It is the research and educational insti-
tutions devoted to agriculture that are
bringing this new time to pass. They are
setting forth new ways of attacking the
countryman’s problems,—the direct way
of first determining causes and then work-
ing out a line of action. This will con-
tribute directly to self-government in all
the localities because it encourages self-
action. The ordinary political means of
encouraging self-government are second-
ary and often only factitious and tempo-
rary. A college of agriculture is not merely
an institution of learning, in the old mean-
ing; it must have within it such a sense of
service, such a range of subjects, and such
an integrity of organization as will enable
it to attack all distinctly rural questions
and to bring a united policy to bear on the
whole problem of rural civilization.

261

THE TRAINING OF FARMERS

The college of agriculture cannot, of
course, attack all the problems of rural
communities directly, but it can set forces
and activities in motion that will go a long
way toward solving many of the questions
not immediately within its sphere. The
very difficult farm-labor problem is a case
in point. The stringency in farm labor
should be alleviated by various forms of
public action; but the final solution of the
difficulty lies in such a redirection of coun-
try life as will enable the situation to take
care of itself. It cannot be expected that
labor may be found in enormous quantities
for very brief periods in the year and im-
ported bodily into country districts; nor
that the individual farmer may look for
satisfactory results from hired’ help that
is brought in from the outside and that has
no connection with the life or interests of
the rural community. The present scarcity
of farm labor is in large part a symptom of
an imperfectly developed rural society, and
the correction must come slowly through a
process of education.

The public begins to realize the situation

262

COLLEGE AND STATE

and to appreciate the contribution that in-
dustrial education is making to the common
good. The people on the farms are begin-
ning to lend a hand: I would have them still
more completely realize their responsibility
and thereby actively help the work to grow,
in the interest not only of farming but of
the national welfare.

It is incumbent on all good citizens,
everywhere, to help forward the rural civil-
ization as actively as the urban civiliza-
tion, for both are equally in need of the
best service of every man and woman.
The commercial and social isolation of
the farm is passing. The country town is
no longer the market and the center of
interest. The farmer is rapidly becoming
a citizen of the world. All his problems
must have a larger treatment’ than they
have ever had before.

263

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