84 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



In the conduct of the county experiment station the institute is reach- 

 ing its highest state of perfection as an organization. Iowa is now 

 dotted with these county stations under the general supervision of the 

 State station at Ames. May the day soon come when every county will 

 have one, where the results from different varieties of grains and grasses 

 and from different methods of cultivation may be seen. In no other way 

 can the benefits of agricultural experiments be brought so close to the 

 business of the average farmer as through the county station. The results 

 achieved by the stations now in operation have been eye openers to many 

 people. Tom Jones has been brought face to face with the fact that what 

 he considered the best corn on earth, the kind he has been raising all his 

 life, and his father before him, stands a poor show for a crop when 

 planted alongside Dick Smith's corn. And maybe Dick Smith has found 

 that an acre of his hundred bushel corn will not make as much fat as an 

 acre of Sam Brown's eighty-bushel corn. 



The institute session, with its many lessons and measures, tends to 

 keep up a year long agitation of agricultural problems among its mem- 

 bers. Show me a man who is full of small gossip and I will show you 

 a man who is not in the institute. If he were he would have some- 

 thing better to talk about. The benefits of the institute session are being 

 felt throughout the county every day. Experiments are being tried, new 

 practices adopted and the results compared daily. 



The increased Interest in really good farming is cleaning up our county 

 fairs. The fake show is not needed to draw a crowd. The crowds 

 gravitate to the stock barns and agricultural halls. This educational 

 spirit is relieving us of the two-headed pig, the three-legged rooster 

 and the man-headed bull, and by removing old prejudices and riding 

 down cranky notions is assisting materially in relieving us of the bull- 

 headed man. 



The institutes are not idle in the matter of home surroundings. There 

 are none of us who cannot think of men working apparently with the 

 notion that the house is only a sleeping place, a coaling station, if you 

 please, where they get supplies to run them from one meal to the next, 

 and may "lay to" for repairs at night. The institutes, through the women's 

 sections, and through the influence of the men who are addressing them, 

 are calling attention to the fact that the whole business of the farm 

 is subsidiary to that little enclosure inside the yard fence, where home 

 is. They are teaching that the keynote of the home is companionship, 

 and that no woman, however gifted by nature, can be a cheerful com- 

 panion if her outlook is over a yard shorn of its verdure by the poultry, 

 and her horizon a brush patch; nor can her company be uplifting to its 

 fullest capacity if, after running chickens and carrying wood and water 

 all day she has to work butter till 11 o'clock at night. 



The corn shows and other exhibitions held in connection with most 

 institutes are of an educational value not to be overlooked. I have not 

 time to touch on this matter farther than to say that the corn show 

 puts men in touch with good seed corn in their own county, which is 

 thoroughly acclimated. They buy that instead of sending to a seed 

 house for corn from no-one-knows-where. 



