Farmers' Week in Agricultural College. Ill 



The main thing I want to say to you in closing is that we liave 

 welcomed you here in order that you could have a good time, hut if that 

 were all, our efforts would he in vain. We ha^'e welcomed you to our 

 city hecause we like to have you among us, but if that were all. our 

 efforts would be in vain. We have invited you that you may carry back 

 a story. We have invited you to come and to get your co-operation to 

 put this great work of training the boys and the girls to see the beauties 

 of their farm work. There are men here tonight who perhaps twenty -five 

 years ago bought a farm and went in debt for it. Farmers of the past 

 have gone in debt for their farms. You are going in debt for them 

 today and in the future will still go in debt for them, and perhaps 

 twenty-five years after you bought the farm at $25 an acre you lifted 

 the mortgage, and if you can recall the day when you paid that last 

 note of the mortgage? I say to you that that was one of the greatest 

 days of your life — the day when you looked out over your broad acres 

 which you had paid for by hard toil from morning until night and 

 realized they were yours. But what are you going to take for your 

 farm today? You are going to ask, perhaps, from three to four times 

 $25 and hand it down to that boy in a half worn-out condition, perhaps 

 worth not three- fourts as much as it was twenty -five years, ago, and 1 

 am saying that any man who is not making his soil better by the methods 

 he is using upon his farm is farming wrong. Now that bright boy of 

 yours who is more than life to you is going to buy this farm and pay 

 from $75 to $100 an acre, and how, under the shining sun, is he going 

 to pay for that farm if he farms the way we have been farming in the 

 past ? But perhaps he is not going to farm that way. ' There is about 

 as much improvement today in the methods of farming over twenty-five 

 years ago as is in the method of digging ditches over twenty-five years 

 ago. We are coming together to talk things over. You are leaving 

 your homes and coming here to see the results of the problems we are 

 working out. You are coming to hear the story and carry it back home. 

 You are trying to learn something new, recognizing, the fact, however, 

 that there is something yet to know. In our institutes we find a great 

 many people who do not attend, some of whom will stand on the corner 

 of the street and make fun of what I have to say when they don't know 

 what I have to say. They call me a book farmer, and I say that any 

 man today who is not at least something of a book farmer doesn't know 

 how little he knows. And do you know that if we were all like that 

 fellow, who would not cross the street to go to an institute meeting, or 

 would not pay 15 cents to come to this meeting, the man who ol)jects to 



