STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 17 



ANNUAL ADDRESS. 



Delivered by Hon. Horace Davis before the California State Agricultural Society, 



at Sacramento, September 23, 1880. 



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I have been asked to 

 address your Society regarding the need of a Bureau of Agriculture, 

 whose special province shall be to examine the conditions of farming 

 on this coast and minister to its wants. The need of such a provi- 

 sion was first suggested to me some years ago by a distinguished 

 citizen of this city, and it impressed me as a public want. I saw that 

 the researches and the publications of the Agricultural Department 

 had been hitherto almost totally occupied by subjects of interest to 

 the Eastern farmer, while the new methods of farming and the new 

 products of this Western coast were wholly unnoticed. As I revolved 

 in my mind, I saw a difficulty in obtaining an appropriation for such 

 a bureau, based simply on a sectional or geographical distinction, 

 but I thought the radical climatic differences between the extreme 

 East and the country west of the Rocky Mountains, which are 

 reflected in their different methods of agriculture, might justly 

 demand some consideration. Prof. Hilgard, in a thoughtful paper 

 published in the Agricultural Report of eighteen hundred and 

 seventy-eight, says: "The salient climatic feature of California is 

 that practically all the water relied on for the production of crops 

 falls between the middle of November and the first of April " (I 

 would have said the first of May). " It is during this period that 

 the crops are made or undone." This diversity of condition between 

 a country amply supplied with rain all the year round, like the 

 Atlantic States, and one scantily watered or where a rainless period 

 of months intervenes between the wet seasons, this difference, I say, 

 lies at the root of most of the changes we have had to make in the 

 old methods of farming, and might justly call for a separate bureau, 

 or at least the detail of a special officer to observe and collect facts 

 for publication when such an expenditure could not be demanded 

 merely on the grounds of geographical distance. 



You will all remember how little faith we all had in early times in 

 California farming. To a man from the Atlantic States, with their 

 copious rains in every month of the year, where the soft green sward 

 covered the pastures in Summer — where every unoccupied spot 

 was clothed in forest, where nature from May to October wore her 

 brightest and most winning dress — to such a man it seemed absurd 

 to attempt to till these dry plains and bare brown hills. We then 

 thought that when we had exhausted the crop of gold the country 

 would be worthless, and we should all abandon it to the Mexican and 

 his mustangs. We forgot that nature's means and methods were 

 infinite, that there were many paths to success in tilling the soil 

 besides those we had trod in our early days ; we were blind to the 



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