604 EXPEKIMENT STATION EECOED. 



crops, nor do they hesitate long to adopt telephones, new machinery, 

 or other aiDpliances that ^Yill save time or increase their own effi- 

 cienc3\ The result is that the younger generation of farmers is being 

 recruited from the brightest and best educated of our young men, 

 particularly from the graduates of the agricultural colleges, and 

 that these recruits are rapidly putting into practice everything worth 

 while from the researches of our agricultural institutions. 



These young men are taking up farming with their eyes open. 

 They realize that the farmers of the future will have to meet much 

 sharper competition and be content to cultivate many acres of less 

 fertile soil than those who cleared the virgin forests or broke the 

 prairie sod, but they also see clearly that the population of the 

 country is increasing more rapidly than the number of farms, the 

 number of farmers, or the yield of farm products, and that this 

 increasing population must have food and the materials from which 

 clothing is made. Seeing these things and knowing that they can 

 depend upon the agricultural research institutions of the country to 

 help them solve the more difficult of their new problems as they arise, 

 the agricultural college graduates look upon farming with optimism, 

 as something permanent and worthy of their best endeavor. 



It is, however, important that both the public and the colleges 

 should understand that one of the most useful, and indeed necessary, 

 functions of the agricultural colleges is to train the investigators and 

 teachers who are to discover new agricultural truth and to dissemi- 

 nate this knowledge to students and to the farming communities. 

 T\^iatever the agricultural colleges have done in this line in the past, 

 and they have done much, should be credited to them as a contribution 

 to the advancement of American agriculture. 



The great movement for agricultural education and research which 

 has gone on in this country for over half a centur}^, and which has 

 now culminated in active efforts to carry the new knowledge which 

 has been acquired by this Department and the experiment stations 

 to the masses of our rural population, has very largely been organized 

 and led by men trained in our agricultural colleges or connected with 

 them as teachers or inAestigators, For the proper conduct of this 

 Department and the State departments of agriculture, the agricul- 

 tural colleges and stations, the rapidly increasing number of sec- 

 ondary and elementary schools in which agriculture is being taught, 

 and the farmers' institutes, movable schools and other extension 

 agencies for the instruction of the thirty million people on our farms, 

 hundreds of graduates of agricultural colleges are now required and 

 many more will be needed in the near future. 



The colleges should therefore be encouraged to increase the effi- 

 ciency of their courses intended especially for the training of teachers 

 and investigators. Congress has- specifically pointed this out by 



