No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 279 



naturally for his information. The common idea is that the farmer 

 simply sits in a large easy chair and has nothing else to do but read 

 pamphlets. Perhaps he reads a pamphlet in the Winter and wishes 

 to apply (he information; but he has to do something else in the 

 meantime. By the time he gets to seeding his clover, he forgets 

 what he had read about it. In other words, the pamphlet appeals 

 to him at the wrong season of the year, and consequently it has 

 been a slow task of getting the information to the farmer through 

 the pamphlets. How did my father do? I remember as we rode 

 through the country to the camp meeting he and mother would dis- 

 cuss the planting, the farm-buildings and appearance of the farms 

 we passed. I know now that he would rarely come back from the 

 camp meeting without some physical good as well as spiritual good. 

 He was taking notes on the way to and fro. It does not take an 

 observing farmer very long to see how time changes the way of 

 doing things. Yet we tried for a long time through pamphlets to 

 disseminate this information. 



The next method was by lectures both in your Institutes and in 

 our instructional trains running through the State. The farmer 

 will gain information nuich better from the lectures than from the 

 pamphlets; but as a rule even this is not the way he gets informa- 

 tion. He was not sent to a college, when he learned luiw to take 

 notes. 



The third way of getting information to the farmer is ihe way we 

 are now trying to do at the State College and this is fo bring the 

 farmer to the college. Do you realize that in the State of Kansas 

 20,000 farmers visited the State College and every farmer who came 

 there saw something and took away some ideas with him. Think 

 of the men who passed through the dairy building and saw how 

 to keep their milk clean. Few ever saw before in their lives the 

 growth of bacteria as they saw it on the culture glass there. How 

 n)any farmers before that time had seen the effects of a small piece 

 of cow dung dropped into milk and allowed to stay for twenty-four 

 hours. When the farmer sees that he learns the value of clean milk. 

 When he goes over the experimental plots at The Pennsylvania 

 State College, — some of them twenty-eight years old; that is for 

 twenty-eight years these have had a rotation of crops, first one crop 

 and then another, some with various kinds of fertilizer and others 

 which have never had a particle of manure or commercial fertilizer 

 and these he sees all grown over with red top; and next to it per- 

 ha])S is the plot that has had only barnyard manure. He sees all 

 these plots and he gets a lesson and he goes home convinced; and 

 to my mind with a thousand pamphlets or 500 lectures you would 

 not convince him the way going there and seeing it himself would 

 convince him. For that reason we are trying for better railroad 

 facilities at State College, and I am taking this opportunity to adver- 

 tise to that extent; I want your help. We are after the Pennsyl- 

 \^ania Eailroad Company. We are camping on their front steps at 

 present, trying to get better railroad connections. Nine miles of 

 railroad built over a sandy region of comparatively level ground 

 would connect us with the main line at Tyrone. 



I met a man the other day at Clearfield, who told me that he went 

 over to the State College winter before last and stayed there during 

 Farmers' W^eek. That was six davs. He said that he came home 



