4G4 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



II \vide-iiwake, intelligent class of farmers, who invariably manifest a live inter- 

 est throughout the proceedings. 



Year after year these meetings are growing in interest and usefulness, and 

 through the published reports they are disseminating a large amount of valu- 

 able information among the farmers, which is directly in the line of their work. 

 The contact into whicii the farmers and professors are thus brought is emi- 

 nently beneficial to both, — each feels that he has much to learn as well as some- 

 thing to communicate. 



In the past the complaint has been that you could not educate a young man 

 without educating him away from the farm. That when the farmer's son goes 

 to college he is not likely to go back to farming. It was hardly so much as 

 expected that he should think of farming when he became a scholar. That so 

 many of our brightest, most cultured and enterprising young men turn aside 

 from farming to find occupation in other pursuits, is a fact to be deplored. 

 One chief cause of this no doubt is to be found in the circumstances and asso- 

 ciations of their early life. Unattractive rural homes, where everything is re- 

 duced to the most hum-drum, commonplace, matter-of-fact style of living, 

 where to the desire to lay up something for the future all present comforts and 

 attractions are sacrificed, methods of conducting operations on the farm which 

 allow no scope for intelligence and thought; these have produced an intense 

 dislike in the mind of many a youth for farm life and work. Don't be afraid 

 of a small investment in ornamental trees and shrubs and flowers, or of the 

 few hours' work necessary to grade and sod a lawn about the house. Both 

 the future and the present will be richer in regard to all true riches for the 

 outlay that will make the home attractive both inside and out. Make it a place 

 that the children will be loth to leave, and when they do leave it, as many, of 

 necessity, must, they will always regard it as one of the greatest pleasures of 

 their life to return to it again. So conduct your operations on the farm that 

 the young will always feel their need of knowledge and realize the constant 

 opportunities which their occupation gives for putting it into practice. 



Do not teach your children to think that other occupations are easier, pleas- 

 anter, and give to labor a richer remuneration, for such is not the case. It is 

 not surprising that so many youth have turned away with a feeling of dislike 

 from an avocation which they have been taught to regard as having nothing 

 better to promise them than ceaseless care and a life of unremitting and 

 poorly remunerated toil. If they had been taught the reasons for and the condi- 

 tions which render necessary the operations they performed, and if, when they 

 manifested a taste for reading and acquiring information, they had been en- 

 couraged not to direct their energies to other pursuits, but rather to look at the 

 splendid field open to them for the application of scientific knowledge to farm- 

 ing, we can hardly estimate how much would have been gained. Honor your 

 occupation as farmers. Teach others to respect it by respecting it yourselves, 

 and remember tliat in this, as in all other callings, our success in the long 

 hereafter will be measured, not bv the monev we have made, but bv the good 

 that we have done. 



