STATE AGBICULTURAL SOCIETY. Ill 



Board of Directors of their own calling and fully in sympathy with 

 them; so, for the present and near future, the actual farmers, horti- 

 culturists, and stock-growers are, and Vv'ili be, in a great measure, 

 responsible for the success or the failure of the State Fair. In order 

 that it may be encouraged in all its essential departments, generous 

 concessions, equity, perfect good faith and confidence should be 

 inspired by every act of the Board of Directors. Then it will not be 

 long before our people will be fully educated up to the conception 

 that an agricultural fair is a profitable school of object-teaching by 

 comparison, in which every one may receive its benefits and transmit 

 its blessings. It should be made the occasion for an annual reunion 

 of all the friends and promoters of material increase. With teams, 

 and stock, and household gods about him, let the farmer, for a brief 

 season, leave his daily round of toil, come up here, camp in the tented 

 field, if need be, and by his presence and example contribute to a 

 laudable enterprise in which he has a special interest. _ By so doing, 

 a generous pride in the promotion of his avocation will be engen- 

 dered ; the love of country and our kind will be strengthened. Such 

 annual associations will encourage the beautifying of our homes, the 

 resuscitation and improvement of our farms. And with reason, for 

 the apparent universal desire of every farmer to scratch in all the 

 land that he can buy or rent, necessarily tends to imperfect work, and 

 consequently results in indifferent crops. The seed crops of the 

 Western and Atlantic States, which enable the farmers to pasture and 

 rest their lands, are, owing to our long dry seasons, impossible of pro- 

 duction here, save in favored localities. Consequently, summer- 

 fallow, artihcial, or other concentrated stimulants, and the debris of 

 the winter floods utilized, appear to be the only resources left to us 

 by which to impede or prevent ultimate exhaustion of the fairest 

 fields ever inherited by any people. 



Large tracts of land held without cultivation, or imperfectly tilled 

 without resuscitation, is against the public interest, and against the 

 interest of humanity. That her strength may be sufficient to nourish 

 the generations which are to follow ours, the refuse of production, at 

 least, should be returned to the land which produced it; and he who 

 continually gleans his fields without restitution is but a public scourge 

 and vandal, whose ultimate inheritance, as well as that of his poster- 

 ity, will end in dust and bitterness. Man in his pride may boast of his 

 possessions, and count as his own thousands of "God's acres;" but the 

 glory and prosperity and security of that country is greatest wherein 

 the greatest portion of its people have secured homes. To promote 

 this result should be the great aim of every one; for he who most lives, 

 lives most for his country and his kind. Although the annual pro- 

 ducts of cereals is usually sufficient to supply the demand for bread, 

 it is, nevertheless, very unequally distributed. The wheat crop of the 

 world aggregates an annual average crop of about 1,450,000,000 bushels, 

 or about one bushel for every living human being on the face of the 

 globe. Of this amount the average product of the United States is 

 about 410,000,000 bushels. In consequence of short crops there will 

 be a deficiency in Europe the present year of 160,000,000 bushels. To 

 supply this extraordinary demand Russia will be able to furnish 

 about 50,000,000 bushels; the remainder, or about 110,000,000 bushels, 

 will have to be supplied by the United States. The most recent report 

 of the Department of Agriculture estimates the wheat crop of the 

 United States at eight per cent, below the average yield of last year; 



