Ill, — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE 



for all the centuries before the advent of the science of agriculture. He 

 is Millet's "Man with the Hoe" before he grew up. From time immemo- 

 rial civilization has rested on the broad shoulders of the agricultural 

 workers of the world, but before their eyes has opened up no vista of 

 opportunity or of hope for them or for their children. Theirs has been 

 the bitter choice between a life of unending drudgery on the one hand 

 and the hell of starvation on the other. 



In the last half-century the Department of Agriculture has spent 

 some two hundred and fifty million dollars largely in research and ex- 

 periment, to the end that American agriculture might be put on a high 

 plane of efficiency. The results of this research and experiment have 

 been agronomy and animal industry, a vast, but largely undigested and 

 uncoordinated, mass of information about how to grow crops and "crit- 

 ters." During this entire period the department has been accumulating 

 and hoarding a vast store of facts about how to increase production. 



Thus during the first fifty years of its existence the department was 

 chiefly a bureau of scientific research that gave the farmer from time to 

 time an assortment of miscellaneous scientific information that he might 

 or might not be able to utilize to his financial advantage. Unfortunately, 

 a world of practical problems that destroy the farmer's peace of mind 

 and involve the success or failure of his business — namely, his business 

 and economic problems — were virtually ignored. In other words, for the 

 first fiftv^ years of its life the department hopped along on one leg, the 

 scientific leg. Happily, during the last three years a miraculous thing has 

 happened: the department has grown another leg, the leg of business and 

 economic efficiency. Now it begins to walk, and we confidently expect 

 in the near future to see it going forward with giant strides. 



During the last three years, for the first time in its history, the De- 

 partment of Agriculture has had at its head an economist. Under the 

 direction of Secretary Houston it has achieved a new point of view and 

 a new conception of its mission. For half a century the department has 

 used its utmost endeavors to show^ the farmer how to fight the chinch- 

 bug and the army-worm, the cattle tick and the Hessian fly and other 

 insect pests, but had not even so much as attempted to show him how 

 to protect himself from the yearly toll levied upon the fruits of his toil 

 by such human pests as the usurer, commercial pirates posing as legiti- 

 mate middlemen, and the other business parasites of the agricultural 

 world. 



The farmer who makes two blades of grass grow where only one 

 grew before may be a good agronomist, but if he cannot sell his second 

 blades at a profit, he is a poor farmer. In other words, farming is pri- 

 marily a business. Very few practical farmers till the soil to demonstrate 

 principles of agronomy. They produce crops to live rather than live to 

 produce crops. Even more than large production they want profitable 

 production. Upon the realization of this fundamental fact is founded the 

 agricultural renaissance which recently has been begun. . . . 



[A] recent achievement of prime importance has been the working 

 out of a system of direct retail distribution to the farmer of the accumu- 

 lated results of the scientific research of the last half-century. While 

 each of the older bureaus of the department has many years of honest 



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