414 S'J^ATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE 



Now ovoryfliiiifj: has clianood. Tlip ooiniminHy as it increases in wealth 

 demands a lai'j;er variety of food products and is willing to pay for the 

 very best that can be grown. The farmer to meet this demand finds the 

 education of his father and grandfather no longer sufficient. He must 

 learn how to do more things and better things than ever they did. His 

 education must be of a broader and more varied kind than their's was. 

 The successful farmer of the future will not spend his life in manual 

 drudgery, working Avitli his hands from sun to sun, as his ancestors did, 

 while his wife drudges from sunrise to midnight to do her share of the 

 work and at the same time board the farm laborers. He will work less 

 with his hands and more with his brains. Much of the old-time drudgery 

 will be done away with by the use of machinery, and w^hat remains will 

 be done by common laborers, which, lilvc the poor, we will always have 

 with us, although, like the poor, tliey are becoming few^er as machinery 

 pushes them up in the scale of humanity. 



Above all, the farmer of the future must be an educated man. He 

 must have a cultured brain and know how *to use it in his business. 

 There are two things which characterize a thoroughly intelligent and 

 well educated man. First, natural brain capacity, which he inherits 

 from his ancestry, and second, culture, which is obtained only by syste- 

 matic training. The first is possessed in large measure by our farming 

 population, as is seen by considering the fact that thousands of our 

 most eminent lawj'Crs, legislators, bankers and merchant princes began 

 life as farmers' boys. How is the farmer's boy to get the second, 

 namely, brain training or culture? The experience of the race for a 

 thousand years shows that the best, if not the only practicable way 

 is to send him to college. If we talce the farmer's boy and want to make 

 a minister, a doctor or a lawyer out of him we must send him to a college 

 of theology or medicine or law. If we want to make him a superintendent 

 of a machine shop, even, or a builder of locomotives or of electric light- 

 ing plants, we must send him to a mechanical college. The day is com- 

 ing, if it is not already here, when if we want to make a successful 

 farmer of him we must send him to college. Not to the old-fashioned 

 college, where he will spend his best years in Latin, Greek and mental 

 philosophy, which will be of no use to him, and in foot-ball and rowing, 

 which may be useful as antidotes to the Greek and Latin, but to a col- 

 lege where he will study English literature and mathematics, two most 

 essential elements of practical brain training, and the natural and 

 physical sciences which have a direct application to agriculture. In the 

 college, also, he will learn the scientific and only true way of making 

 experiments and of drawing conclusions from his own experiments and 

 from those of others. In the agricultural college he will not only obtain 

 the broad foundations of an education, but he will be taught by actual 

 practice in the field the best ways of doing things on the farm. In its 

 library he will have access to books and periodicals which contain the 

 latest information concerning the progress of the science and practice 

 of agriculture throughout the world, by the use of which he will acquire 

 habits of study and of scientific thinking which will cling to him through 

 life, which will not only be a constant source of pleasure in the intervals 

 of rest from toil, but will also be of material benefit in assisting him to 

 solve the numerous perplexing problems which will arise in the ever- 

 changing and ever-advancing progress of the farming industry. 



