78 * AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



for you to send the products of your soil to market in a con- 

 densed form. 



While I am not here to instruct you, I feel that if I could in 

 any way encourage or aid you to increase the fertility of your 

 farms and to develop Aroostook county which Maine is so proud 

 of, it would be a great satisfaction to me. 



THE MISSING LINK IN OUR STOCK HUSBANDRY. 



By W. W. Hubbard, Agricultural Agent, Canadian Pacific 



Railway. 



Allow me a word of explanation of my position in connection 

 with a railway corporation. You will naturally inquire why the 

 Canadian Pacific Railway should have an agricultural agent. 

 Well, the first reason is that we want more business for the 

 eastern end of our road. As Mr. Oilman has very well said, our 

 governments, both provincial and federal, in the Dominion of 

 Canada, have been doing a good deal to help agriculture. It 

 may be that our people are rather slow, I am sorry to say that 

 many of them are, and they need more encouragement, more 

 spurring on, than the people on this side of the line. At any 

 rate, it has been deemed advisable by the government to do all it 

 can to promote agriculture. Since 1890 we have been doing our 

 best, through our provincial government, to stimulate dairying, 

 in some parts with very great success. In the southern part of 

 the country the returns are very satisfactory and dairymen there 

 are doing very well. Along the valley of the St. John river, of 

 which you might be said to be a part, the people have not taken 

 so kindly to dairying, although they have far better facilities for 

 raising all kinds of fodder crops, they have better pasturage, and 

 are much better situated for dairying than the men who are mak- 

 ing the best success of it, in the hilly and poorer parts of the 

 province. Dairy stock has been talked persistently to these 

 people, but whereas fifteen or twenty years ago they were keep- 

 ing, perhaps, a class of stock that was better adapted for making 

 flesh than they are today, they were keeping far more of it, and 

 we now have hundreds of farms along the banks of the St. John 

 that are carrying practically no cattle at all. 



