The Bulletin. 7 



K 



pride to that which we have accomplished during the last three or four years. 

 However, people who are not acquainted with the South and with its people 

 and with its history cannot realize what the Southern farmer has borne as a 

 burden. They cannot realize through what trials and tribulations he has 

 come up to his present state of mind as being a progressive, active, energetic 

 seeker after knowledge. Go to the statistics and you will find that the average 

 production per acre of standard crops throughout the United States is but very 

 little more than that of forty years ago. My recollection is that the great 

 State of Iowa produces no more to the acre to-day than it did forty years ago. 

 The advance in the production of wheat and small grains has been material, 

 but not to the same extent as Europe has advanced. But what of the people 

 of the South? Dr. Hopkins told you this morning that he looked up the records 

 in Georgia, and that there the production for the average ten-year period 

 forty years ago was 10.8 bushels per acre, and that it was the same three 

 years ago. But in 1911 it was 60.5 bushels to the acre. Your own averages 

 have gone up, so that while for 1910 it was 13.6, in 1911 it was 1S.4. In South 

 Carolina the same thing is happening. For a ten-year period, going back of 

 the last three years, her average production of corn was less than 12 bushels 

 to the acre. In 1910 and 1911 she produced an average of more than IS bushels 

 to the acre. So I might instance other States all the way around, even where 

 they have a different climate, as in Texas and Oklahoma, where they have a 

 different transition period. We find in every instance that the average pro- 

 duction per acre at the present time is far above the general ten-year average 

 and above the average of any period in the history of these States. 



Not only that, but the agricultural figures for 1909, which appeared in 1910. 

 show that there has been a wonderful advance in the growth and production of 

 forage crops and of food crops in the South. The corn crop of 1910 exceeded 

 that of 1909 for these Southern States by more than 1.50,000,000 bushels. Go 

 into almost any county in these Southern States and you will find farmers 

 who never talked, five or ten years ago, of growing vetch or clover or grass 

 or alfalfa, and you will find them to-day actually doing these things. 



The best illustration I can give of what a disinterested party said in judg- 

 ment of these people occurred last winter. A prominent agriculturist of the 

 Northwest came to Washington to investigate the demonstration work carried 

 on in the South. I asked him to go into the field and find out for himself 

 what the Southern people thought of the work. I told him to go and find out 

 for himself what the farmer thought about scientific agriculture, how much 

 he was interested, and how much he was interested in the things that had been 

 done in the South. During his tour of investigation he dropped into the State 

 of North Carolina, went into a certain county and drove out into the country. 

 He had been told by the Department that the people of the South were poor 

 agriculturally. He came back in a week and told me that he was astonished 

 to find the large number of farmers in the country on their own farms who 

 were interested in modern, up-to-date farming. "Why," he said, "I find those 

 farmers of North Carolina intensely American, intensely awake, and anxious 

 to learn everything about farming." And these are typical people of the 

 South at the present time. 



The very fact that at this Institute you have a record attendance simply 

 bespeaks the fact that interest in agriculture in the South is constantly on 

 the increase. We are learning that it does not pay to depend upon Nature 

 and upon conditions as we find them to do things for us. Providence farming 

 is played out. 



I want to talk to you for just a little while, before I enter into the real dis- 

 cussion of what I started out to say, about one viewpoint of our agricultural 

 problems in the South. I said that we were in a transition period. If a 

 new system is to be adopted, it will not come suddenly, but will be a process 

 of education and of demonstration upon the farms lasting over a period of 

 years. A body politic adjusts itself to new conditions slowly. It changes not 

 rapidly, but gradually, to a new condition. It seems to me that in this tran- 

 sition period it is most important that these men who are most deeply interested 

 in the agricilltural life of the South should bend their utmost attention upon 

 the problem of seeing to it that such a system is finally adopted as will make 

 a permanent, lasting, and successful system of agriculture. The very talk 



