Farmers' Week in Agricultural College. 103 



au uiidienee of representative farmers — farmers who have become in a 

 measure aristocratic in their ways. You should go to your homes and 

 act as a guiding star in your eonnnunity, urging the farmers to join 

 together and work liand in hand for the betterment of their conditions, 

 and when you have co-operated I see before you a bright and goklen 

 future when you shall reap a just reward for your labor. 



OUR DUTY TO THE STATE AND HER PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS. 



(Geo. B. Ellis, managing editor, Missouri Farmer and Breeder.) 



We Missourians take pride in the wonderful 

 al)undance and variety of the natural resources of 

 our State, and are too much given to boasting about 

 what God has done for us without thinking about 

 what we can or should do to improve on nature. 

 We sometimes boast that we could build a Chinese 

 wall around our State and shut out the products 

 of all the rest of the world, and that we could pro- 

 duce everything necessary for feeding and clothing 

 several times our present population. This is true, 

 Geo. B. Ellis. ]jut liow nuich is it to our credit if we fail to develop 



our natural resources to the highest possibility ? We owe it to Missouri 

 as individuals and collectively in our various organized bodies to give 

 her a name for high quality in everything we produce for the market. 

 We claim that we have a greater numl^er of apple trees planted in Mis- 

 souri than has any other state in the Union. But what about the 

 apples? At Christmas time, when I wanted a box of really fine apples 

 to distribute the force in our printing office, I had to buy Washington 

 apples because I could not find any first-class Missouri apples on the 

 Columbia market. At my l:)oarding house I am served most every morn- 

 ing for breakfast with an orange from California, although I would 

 much prefer a nicely leaked apple from some Missouri orchard. If our 

 orchardists did their duty to themselves and to their State, not only Mis- 

 souri breakfast tables would be supplied with home-grown apples, but 

 tlie Missouri brand would be called for by every other state and country 

 in the world. I would appeal to our State Board of Horticulture and 

 to the Horticultural Department of the State University, to our Fruit 

 Experiment Station at Mountain Grove, and to every individual horti- 

 culturist present to make such an organized effort that scale and blight, 

 frost and codling moth and every other enemy of the fruit business in 



