444 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION THE REMEDY. 



The writer who quotes these words of admonition and warning to the 

 English farmers, insists that they must acquire an equally good industrial 

 education with that of their foreign rivals or be **oul stripped in the indus- 

 trial race," and that (his education must be given in the school. In 

 France the primary and higher school in every rural district is obliged to 

 provide a cours<^ of agricultural teaching, and besides, there are in that 

 Republic 4,000 example plots for agricultural experiments maintained at 

 an annual expense of about |t>0 each, chiefly from local contributions of 

 the land and labor required, the government furnishing the seeds and 

 manures. These are some of the lessons furnished from abroad, proving 

 that one very important remedy at least for the decline of the farming 

 interest is to be found in that practical, thorough, scientific agricultural 

 education, which is one of the leading aims of the Michigan Agricultural 

 College. 



INFLUENCE OF THE COLLEGE. 



That this institution is now, and has been, a most efficient aid to the 

 farming interest in our State and in the entire country is clear to every 

 one conversant with its record. There is not an agricultural industry in 

 Michigan, or in the United States, that has not felt the beneficent touch of 

 its influence, either through its class instruction, its original investiga- 

 tions, its scientitic experiments, its periodical reports and circulars issued 

 by its professors ]»resenting the results of their inquiries, the lectures 

 given by the members of its faculty to farmers' institutes and other agri- 

 cultural meetings, the sending forth of the alumni into all parts of the 

 land as living epistles of the information it imparts, and perhaps more 

 than all, in the creation of a public opinion that the world's greatest in- 

 dustry merits the application of science and the use of scientific methods 

 as well as those minor industries which, important as they are, have really 

 a less significant ])art in the production of the w^orld's w^ealth and in 

 the suppl}' of the indispensable requirements of human necessity and com- 

 fort. Observation and experience combine to show that the influence of 

 the higher schools of instruction, is not all measured by the immediate 

 knowledge conveyed to students in the class room, but in the spirit of 

 intelligent inquiry they create and in the spread of accurate informal ion 

 and correct theories in the community at large. Agricultural colleges 

 thus become fountains of irrigation, which in the diffusion of reliable 

 knowledge, give life and vigor to the industry Avliich they are designed to 

 Xjromote; and can we doubt that the future farmers of Michigan will 

 acknowledge that the most valuable and efficient system for irrigating 

 the waiting fields and the uncultured plains and valleys of our State, that 

 could be devised, is afforded by the institution which their considerate 

 and self-sacrificing fathers, out of their frugality and not out of their 

 abundance, founded on this spot and threw open to students forty years 

 since? It was but a small beginning, derided by some, considered chiUK-ri- 

 cal by many, and not even possessing the fullest confidence of all who 

 were willing to make the venture, even though it might be a failure. 



