Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 75 



had been asked whether we had been to Sunday school or not 

 and we said, "yes, ma'am," but after awhile, when mother looked 

 a little bit closer and found sand in our hair, there was trouble 

 brewing. 



Soon after entering upon our duties in Pettis county we 

 began working in co-operation with the county superintendent 

 of schools. About the first thing that we did was to give notice 

 last fall, after school opened, that we would group the districts 

 and make trips explaining the how and why and the method of 

 gathering and storing seed corn. We made the visits to the 

 schools as we had agreed, and many of the boys and girls went 

 into the fields following that and secured seed corn for their farms. 

 The county superintendent said: 



"Now every teacher who will take the pupils to the cornfield 

 and put in the day gathering seed corn will be given credit for a 

 day's work in school, and the teacher will be given full credit 

 for attendance in school." 



The matter is not that a lesson be given within a little dusty 

 schoolhouse to be a lesson in their school life. The greatest 

 lessons that have ever been are in the open field from God's 

 great Book. 



We took the little folks a little farther in their seed work and 

 asked them to test clover seed and alfalfa seed for purity. One 

 fellow said that he made fun of a girl teaching agriculture over 

 at their country school. "Why," he says, "that girl has lived 

 in town nearly all her life and she is teaching farming to the 

 children." One day one of his little chaps asked him for some 

 clover seed. He did not know what she wanted with it, but he 

 gave her the seed and she carried it over to school. In a few 

 days she came back and said, "Papa, that clover seed of yours 

 has sour dock and buckhorn in it." He said, "She was only 

 twelve years of age, but she knew more about the impurities of 

 seed than I did, and I had farmed for over thirty years. She 

 picked out sour dock and buckhorn and showed it to me." 



We took up that line of work with the children for the rea- 

 son that such work is easy for them. It was attractive, they 

 enjoyed it. Carrying the work through the schools, in a very 

 short time we found that they were able to identify or recognize 

 the noxious weed seeds that usually grow in our clover field. 

 As a result, the farmers began bringing their samples of seed 

 to the office to have them looked over. I can take a twelve- 

 year-old boy or girl into the office and in about thirty minutes 



