354 EEPOKT OF OFFICE OF EXPERIMENT STATIONS. 



It would be well worth while to have some one or more men familiar 

 with country conditions and also with the details of management 

 in transportation matters to study the problems involved and 

 endeavor to formulate a plan or set of plans that will be acceptable 

 to the transportation companies which will secure for agricultural 

 people the benefits they need in order properly to market their 

 products and that will also be sufficiently remunerative to the 

 transportation companies to justify them in adopting the methods 

 proposed. 



COUNTY AGRICULTURAL EXPERTS. 



A serious defect in agricultural institute work, considered as an 

 educational force, is its transient nature and in many instances its 

 complete disappearance from the field of acti^^ty for the greater 

 part of the year. During the institute season a force of lecturers 

 comes into a district, comparative strangers to the people and the 

 conditions that exist, deliver addresses, and then leave, never per- 

 haps to appear again in that community. The next year the same 

 or a different corps of institute lecturers come in and go through the 

 same process of lecturing and disappearing, not responsible for 

 getting their teaching into operation in any of the districts they 

 visit. 



As advertising agricultural education this system has operated 

 very well, but now that many communities have become informed 

 with respect to the value of science applied to agricultural operations, 

 some more substantial assistance is demanded and more extended 

 instruction by a responsible body of teachers whose advice is tested 

 in the community in which their instruction is given by actual 

 demonstration in the field. There is need now m many localities 

 in all of the States for a man or a corps of men to be located perma- 

 nently in each county to give attention to the development of its 

 farming interests who will devote their entire time to professional 

 work as advisers and demonstrators along the various lines of agri- 

 culture and home economics in which the community is engaged. 

 The valuable results that have attended this form of assistance 

 in the matter of developing and improving agriculture commend it 

 to the attention of the directors of extension work, whether m con- 

 nection with the farmers' institutes or the agricultural college. The 

 method has been tested abroad until there is no longer a doubt as 

 to its practicability or value. 



In a report to the board of agriculture and fisheries and education, 

 London, 1910, the rural education conference of Great Britain, 

 after a very exhaustive study of methods for securing improvement 

 in agricultural operations, recommended the estabUshment by the 

 county councils of a staff of agricultural experts in each county in 



