Farmers' Week in Agricultural College. 119 



The wonder is that poultry husbandry has survived the shock. Thou- 

 sands of poultry failures throughout the length and breadth of the land 

 are the grim, silent monuments that mark the progress of the industry 

 during these many years in the bondage of ignorance. In the light of 

 our present knowledge, recently acquired through poultry experiments 

 conducted at the experiment stations, a large proportion of the failures 

 could have been avoided. Proof of this will be given in the lantern 

 slides which will follow. It is not our plea that less money should be given 

 to other agricultural interests, but that more support should be and 

 must be given to poultry husbandry. 



Fifteenth — The State, by liberal appropriations, can employ experts 

 to conduct experiments to discover the truth, and then teach this knowl- 

 edge to the people more economically than can each one learn the right 

 way for himself in the expensive school of experience. 



Liberal appropriations for agricultural education are justifiable if 

 for no other reason than on the ground of being good economics. It was 

 infinitely cheapter, for example, for the state of Maine to pay a few thou- 

 sand dollars to carry on experiments which resulted in emphasizing in 

 an authoritative way the fact that hens could be kept more profitably 

 in large flocks and could be fed more successfully by the hopper system 

 of dry feeding; or for the New York Experiment Station to show that 

 mineral matter was an indispensable factor in poultry feeding; or for 

 Cornell Experiment Station to prove that chickens could be reared more 

 successfully and with vastly less expense in large flocks of 250 to 300 in 

 colony houses than in small flocks of 25 to 50 ; or for Connecticut to dis- 

 cover the bacterism pylorum as a cause of one of the most dreaded 

 poultry diseases known as white diarrhea in chickens; or for Rhode 

 Island and the United States Department of Agriculture to discover the 

 cause of the extensive scourge known as "black head" in turkeys; for 

 West Virginia Experiment Station to prove the superiority of pure bred 

 over mongrel poultry, or for the Canadian Experiment Stations to radi- 

 cally increase the market quality of poultry through improved methods 

 of breeding and fattening; for many other states and provinces to dis- 

 cover and give to the world important truths which have revolutionized 

 methods of modern poultry husbandly, yes, vastly cheaper than it would 

 have been for thousands upon thousands of persons all over the world 

 to have attempted to learn these things for themselves, most of which 

 would have been impossible on the farm because of the lack of scientific 

 training and facilities. Poultrymen cannot afford to experiment. The 

 government should do that for them. It is the government's business, 

 not the poultrymen 's. It is the government 's duty and privilege — a priv- 



