No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 459 



Immediately after our plau was advertised, I received a letter 

 from Minuesota, from a young business man, who said he had grad- 

 uated at Yale five years before; he had enough money to buy a farm, 

 and was offered the management of a large ranch, but before buy- 

 ing a farm, or undertaking the management of another man's farm, 

 he wanted to qualify himself to do the work intelligently. He knew 

 nothing about it, whatever. We have generally taken the view that 

 any one is able to run a farm; men have gone into this work with- 

 out anything like the training that would be required in any other 

 work. Everybody knows the training that is required of engineers 

 and professional men, but we have not thought it neces- 

 sary for farming. This man was a college graduate, and 

 he knew that if he wanted to go into farming, he must 

 get a wider experience than he had. I did jiot encourage 

 him to come; I told him he would have to do the hard- 

 est and most disagreeable work on the farm. This did not discour- 

 ag'e him, and he came down from Minneapolis to see me and I em- 

 phasized it even more strongly. That did not deter him; he came, 

 and out in his time one half of each day in putting the books into 

 excellent ehape, and the other half he learned how to mark the plow 

 and do ail the other things that the successful farmer must do in 

 order to accomplish anything. He worked through the summer, and 

 then we advised him to take a technical training in one of our Agri- 

 cultural Colleges; he is there now, and by next spring expects to be 

 ready to take a position. That man was getting several thousand 

 dollars a year salary, and is now prepared to be one of the best kind 

 of farm managers. 



Another instance: A young man who was receiving a good salary 

 from one of the large automobile companies, wrote me. I told him 

 what I had told the other man, but he was not discouraged. He 

 came to Chicago to see me from Cleveland. He had never been on 

 a farm, but was determined to get on the farm. He had followed 

 his father in the shops, and had watched the effect. His father was 

 getting several thousand dollars, and he, himself had been there 

 eight years and was getting eighteen hundred dollars. I said to 

 him "the i)rofession in which you now are offers greater opportuni- 

 ties than you will have in farm work; at your age (he was now 28) 

 you have an excellent start, and you will not make in farming any- 

 thing like the amount you are now getting." He said "I can live 

 on the farm without that much." I reminded him of the hard and 

 disagreeable work he would have to do on the farm. He went home 

 and thought the matter over, and then decided to come. He re- 

 signed his position with this company, which sent him all over the 

 country to design new parts for automobiles. Here was one of the 

 suggestive things he said to me: he said, "they are always hurrying 

 me; we are always under pressure, and I never have time to get 

 things out." He said he had to hurry and get things out for this 

 year, and then go ahead and make changes, so as to make people 

 want to buy new machines next year. This young man was an 

 artist, and had the artist's sense of work. He said: "I want to do 

 something, where I can do something wortli while, and do it well, 

 and I am now going to see whether horticulture and poultry won't 

 give me a comfortable living. I am investing my own money, which 

 I have saved, and I want to make the experiment." When he came 



