238 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



What about the class of the eighty-five per cent who stay 

 on the farm? What are you teaching your boys at home and 

 at school in your community about the different types and 

 breeds and characteristic? of horses, cattle, sheep and hogs? 

 What are they learning about the men whose lives have been 

 spent in the development of these different breeds of live stock? 

 As I travel over the State I ask the boys and girls who was 

 called the father of his country? Their hands come up. The 

 father of the Revolution; their hands come up, and the father of 

 the Constitution; their hands come up. But when I say who is 

 called the father of intelligent live stock breeding not a hand 

 comes up, and Robert Bakewell was six years old when George 

 Washington was born. His name has already gone down in 

 history as one of the world's greatest men. Not a bad thing, 

 do you think, that if country boys and country girls want to 

 study biography they learn right along with the biographies of 

 such men as Mr. Byron, Mr. Keats, Mr. Shelley, Mr. Poe, Mr. 

 Wordsworth, Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Shakespeare, and all the rest 

 of them, biographies of such rhen as Robert Bakewell, Robert 

 Bates, Amos Cruickshank, the Colling brothers, the Thompkins 

 family and many others, just as truly good and useful and noble 

 men as George Washington, James Madison and Samuel Adams. 



What are they learning of the different types of soils and 

 plants best adapted to each? What are they learning about the 

 different varieties of corn and oats and wheat and clover, alfalfa, 

 cowpeas and soy beans? What are they learning about insect 

 pests of the field and the farm and the methods of combating 

 them — the corn root worm, the corn root louse, the corn ear 

 worm, the leaf hopper and so on? What are they learning 

 about the insect pests and fungous diseases of orchards and 

 methods of combating them? What are they learning about 

 farm sanitation, care of the health of animals on the farm, con- 

 trol of hog cholera, eradication of tuberculosis from cattle? 

 What are they learning about weed seed dissemination, eradi- 

 cation of weeds from the farm? What are they learning about 

 architecture, the best way to build cattle sheds, mule barns, 

 hog houses, poultry houses, farm home buildings and the like? 

 I could stand here for a long time and continue asking questions 

 just like these, and what will your answers be? My friends, if 

 you do not teach the country boy something about these things 

 that I have mentioned, what in the wide world have you taught 

 him about the thing with which he will come in contact in after 



