N'o. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 211 



war-horses in this work. I hope they will all feel free to question 

 and criticise what I may say, because I do not appear before you 

 as a teacher, but as a student, and while I can impart little or noth- 

 ing of value to my hearers, I want to get from them a rich fund of 

 information and a multiplicity of improved methods so I may go be- 

 fore the farmers of the State very much better equipped to do my 

 share of the great work of elevating agriculture. 



The subject assigned me on the program is one of my regular 

 topics, but in this instance I will not weary you with the details that 

 might be called for in the average farmer audience but will simply 

 give you an outline or skeleton of it with some of the why's and 

 wherefore's of my sayings. 



This institute work is comparatively a new departure and is just 

 in the formative period, consequently every worker had to originate 

 methods and plans of procedure from rather confused and chaotic 

 data, though the results in our State have been a success beyond 

 the expectations of the most sanguine. Still there are not a few 

 tangles that need straightening out. 



Personally, as I thought over this matter, previous to my starting 

 in this work, I reasoned in this way: To run a farm successfully 

 necessitates a careful previous deliberation or planning, and 1 

 have reason to think that the same is true in doing anything 

 else successfully that is worth doing at all. I am quite sure 

 that it holds good in successful institute- work. I believe every 

 real successful worker very carefully plans a campaign, and then to 

 the best of his or her ability hammers along that line. I am inclined 

 to think that it is even more necessary to specialize in institute work 

 than in farm work itself^ yet there, practically, the specialist is 

 about the only one who succeeds. Therefore, in planning for my 

 institute work I did not try to cover the universe; it was too big, and 

 I too little. 



We speak of the farmer being land-poor. I fear that some of the 

 institute lecturers are also at least field-poor in the same sense. 

 When we try to cover horticulture, floriculture, apiculture, avicul- 

 ture, pisciculture, market gardening, animal husbandry in all its ram- 

 ifications, civil government, civil engineering (laying out and con- 

 structing public roads), domestic economy and general hygiene, and 

 the whole wide educational field from the nursery and kindergarten 

 to the end of the university, we surely have too much ground to cover. 

 True, all these fields should be cultivated, but I seriously doubt if 

 one man can give his best attention to more than one, or a few at 

 most. Therefore, when I started on my mission I chose not even 

 one whole field, but fenced off a little corner in the large field of ani- 

 mal husbandry, viz: dairy husbandry; but I found even my little 

 corner too extensive and tilled only a part of that. 



