82 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



to educate foresters also. Sixty students are in the forests in summer 

 studying and in Washington in the winter, and some day the department 

 of agriculture will have foresters who know something about forests. I 

 presume you learned today how many thousand acres they propose to 

 plant next year. How to teach the lumbermen to do more rational work 

 and stop butchering. What to do to stop fires, and all tliat. 



It is necessary to carry on the soil work. I do not know to what 

 extent you people are studying soil physics, but I beg of you to do some- 

 thing if you are not doing much. Up to the present time no attention 

 has been given to the soil. We do not know anything about it. The 

 agricultural colleges naturally should teach these things. Of course 

 you can only carry them so far. We are taking the young men who 

 graduate in these colleges and teaching them specialties, one man wants 

 to study forestry, another wants to study agricultural chemistry, and 

 so on, and we set them to work specializing when we get them, in the 

 hope that the department of agriculture will have the best educated 

 men along the special sciences that relate to agriculture so as to work 

 out the problems for the American farmer. W^e do not give a dollar's 

 value to work of an}' kind, unless some farmer wants it done. We are 

 ready to assist a farmer at any time, but to investigate for the love of 

 science, we don't do it and I don't believe Congress would give us a dollar 

 to do it. There are forty young men studying soil physics. You go into 

 the plant pathology class and what are they doing? We had one of them 

 studying your little peach here. We had one of them studying the 

 destruction of cotton on the Atlantic coast. The cotton was dying, a 

 rod died this year, an acre died next year. It behaved precisely as your 

 peach tree. We sent a man down there and told him to help those people 

 out, a high priced plant pathologist. The trouble with the cotton j^lant 

 was a fungus that attacked it away down more than a foot below the 

 surface. That is what is the matter with your little peach. That is the 

 latest thing we have been doing in Michigan. We have not published the 

 information yet, but we have ascertained that the difficulty with the 

 peach trees in IMichigan is a fungus away down below the ground. The 

 next thing is to find a remedy. We saved the seed of the cotton plant. 

 It may be immune. Get all the cottons that gTow in the United States 

 and plant them. Some may be immune. Make a hybrid that will be 

 immune. Thus we found the remedy and saved the cotton and it cost 

 the department probably $10,000, perhaps more, but that is the quiet 

 work the department is doing along those lines. Now in regard to your 

 trouble here, we are not going to give up the peach business in Michigan 

 until we find a remedy. We have sent a man to get the original peach 

 from China and bring it here to infuse new blood into your i^eaches, as 

 it may be immune from the fungous growth that is noAv destroying your 

 peach orchards. That Is something that the plant pathologist is doing. 

 We have two thousand gentlemen connected with the department of agri- 

 culture who study science along one line and another. We print every 

 year the result of the work of those gentlemen, ^^^e print 600 different 

 publications every year and we send out 8,000,000 copies to the farmers 

 of the United States. We are alarming the United States in the amount 

 of moneys we are asking for and some think we are ahead of our time, 

 but we are not as long as any problem remains unsolved and we want 

 money to carry on this work for the farmers of the United States. 



In regard to other influences that are operating, the agricultural 



