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liaiuls of the owner of the farm information wliich will enable him to increase 

 the output of his farm. In other words, it is educational work ; it is not 

 exi)eriment station worlc at all ; it is not experimental work. Our conception is 

 to take the results of «'xperiments which apply to any given region and put 

 them in the hands of the farmers, so that they can injjtrove and increase the 

 yield of their fields. That is the kind of discussion that I hoped was coming out 

 of this meeting, and from the general subject one would expect that rather than 

 the ('xi)erimcntal i)hase. Demonstration work and experiment station work, or 

 experimental work, I consider to be absolutely different. Experimental work in 

 many instances, and, in fact, in nearly all instances, is not remunerative ; while 

 demonstration work ought to he exceedingly remunerative, because demonstra- 

 tion work ought to take the results of successful experiments which have been 

 conducted on any given soil area, or under given conditions, and put them in the 

 hands of the farmers, so that they can increase their croji production. That is 

 our idea of what demonstration work is. and that is the sort of work we are 

 trying to take to the farmers in the cotton belt, where the cotton boll weevil 

 has l)een doing its greatest harm. The work 1 am especially interested in is to 

 go into the areas of the cotton belt, where the people know absolutely nothing, 

 in many instances of horticultural work, and enable them to conduct gardens 

 or small truck areas at a profit. Of course we try to study the soil and 

 market conditions, and all those things which will bear on the ultimate outcome 

 of the work, but we divest it as far as possible of the experiment feature. 

 Now, I realize that that is extension work, or ediu-ational work ; but to my mind 

 that is true demonstration work, while the otlu'r work is experiment-station 

 work, or work of investigation. 



C. D. Smith, of Michigan. In Michigan we liave adopted rather the view of 

 the last speaker than that of Director Thorne. To give a concrete instance of 

 the work we are trying to do in our feeble way in the land of the two peninsulas, 

 it was quite impossible for us to get the peach growers to really believe that 

 the results of the experiments of the Department of Agriculture were actually 

 true. We had to go around and give them absolute demonstrations. We took 

 a section of an orchard in the midst of a conununity that was well educated 

 and well grounded in theory, and iiy actual demonstration taught them that 

 s])raying would prevent curled leaf. They had read your l)ulletius from Wash- 

 ington, and had an inherent belief in the truth of those bulletins, but did not try 

 it themselves until somebody went down there and tried it for them. 



We took an apple orchard in the eastern part of the State. We had been 

 preaching that Michigan was a great apple State, and that the apple orchards 

 ought still to be in good condition; lint they said: "That is all theory."' We 

 took the orchard of one man and proposed that we should take the profits and 

 pay him. but at the end of the first season he was anxious to back out of the 

 bargain, and we released him on the condition that he would continue the 

 work. That demonstration did a great deal for the apple section of southeastern 

 Michigan. That is not experimental work. We made no effort to make it 

 experimental. In fact. I have never yet found it safe to trust an experiment 

 to a man outside of the station if we Intended to publish the result. I never 

 will publish a result of an experiment that is not conducted solely by men in 

 the emplo.v of the station. 



We are very much interested in supplies of phosphorus. Farmers have read 

 in the Illinois Ijulletins what phosphorus will do in that State when derived 

 from the finely ground rock ; but you know we have a set of people coming from 

 Ohio and other less civilized portions of the country who made our farmers 

 believe that it was never safe to use phosphorus unless the rock had been treated 

 with sulphuric acid, and we tried the experiment. We asked a farmer if he 



