376 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



of Agriculture, as much as any inau in Pennsylvania. 1 know, per- 

 sonally, the men who are here, have known them for many years, 

 and have the advantage of understanding what they have been 

 thinking about and doing in the last 25 j-ears, and I am ready to say 

 that a more devoted band of men in the interest of agriculture, for 

 the uplifting of the agriculture of this State, does not exist any- 

 where in the United States, than we have here in our good old State 

 of Pennsylvania. 



You doubtless want to know what is going on dowai at the head- 

 quarters of the agriculture in this country. And when I speak of 

 the headquarters, you ought to understand without my designating 

 it, that it means the Department of Agriculture of the United 

 States. Dr. Atherton in his address yesterday spoke of the wonder- 

 ful event that took place about 40 years ago in connection with the 

 establishment of the Agricultural Colleges of this country. I do 

 not know whether you have taken the trouble to look into the his- 

 tory of agriculture, so as to really appreciate how^ much has been 

 done for its development in the last 40 or 50 years. The fact is that 

 agriculture has come to be what it has within this period. I have 

 an inventory of a farmer's property that was sold 50 years ago in 

 Pennsylvania in one of our most fertile valleys on a farm that had 

 200 acres of land, and that had been cultivated since the time of the 

 Revolutionary War. The implements on that farm at a public sale 

 brought 173.50, and it was a w'ell-kept farm for its day. And now 

 implements on the same farm, or a farm of similar character, will 

 cost anywhere from |800 to ^2,500. I do not know of any gauge 

 that show^s the progress of an industry with greater accuracy than 

 the implements of that industry. Take your manufacturing estab- 

 lishments and compare them to-day, in their machinery and methods 

 of manufacture with the machinery and methods w^hich they used 

 50 years ago, and you can rate their progress in other respects from 

 the single item of improvement in the machinery that they use. 

 This is also trwe in agriculture. The agricultural implement busi- 

 ness has increased in the last 50 years about 402 per cent. Our 

 population has increased in that same time about 229 per cent., and 

 thus you can see, that the implements of our trade have increased 

 at a rate more than double that of the population of the country. 



Mr. Chairman, 50 years ago there w^as not a man living that knew 

 about many of the things that we talk about in our Institute work 

 in the most familiar way. For instan('(^: Who knew about fertili- 

 zers and their uses as we do now, 50 years ago? Who knew about the 

 action of nitrogen, i)hosphoric acid and ])otash 50 years ago, and who 

 even knew that there was such a thing as a balanced ration? Who 

 knew anything about agricultural bacteriology 50 year ago?* Tt is 

 only about ten years since we have really «ome to understand what 



