NINETEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 393 



The county agent work in the counties lias aimed in the past, at in- 

 creased production; especially during the last two years or during the war 

 period, the county agents have given nearly their entire time to that line 

 of work, and little to the other lines county agents should take up. The 

 idea of a state federation is not peculiar to Iowa. Nearly all the eastern 

 states are federated. The idea of a state federation primarily was to cor- 

 relate the work of the county agents of the different counties. One county 

 seems to have been working along one line, and another county along 

 another line. They lacked unity One county may have an idea which 

 should be handed on to other counties, and for that reason we thought 

 the work could be correlated and strengthened very much by a state or- 

 ganization or state federation. 



More than that, however, was the thought that the work has been 

 principally productive and not economical The great problems of eco- 

 nomic agriculture have not been touched. Our Agricultural College vir- 

 tually has not touched them at all. The Deartment of Agriculture — with- 

 out criticism or fault-finding — its activities are directed by men who are 

 professional men rather than farmers, who develop the projects for in- 

 creased production and let the details of marketing go — the marketing 

 channels and transportation question are untouched by any power which 

 at present exists, except by organizations such as your own. 



So we felt the need of a strong central organization which would take 

 up these various problems. There is the problem of agricultural educa- 

 tion. You know well enough, to be successful in our system of agriculture 

 at all, every boy and girl in the state must have equal advantages with the 

 boys and girls in the cities. There is no reason why our country educa- 

 tion should not be built up and strengthened, not only in the agricultural 

 colleges, but also in the secondary schools. 



Aside from that, there is a thing that has appealed to me all thru the 

 county agent work, and that is the great system of citizenship. You gen- 

 tlemen know that citizenship and soil run in parallel lines. You do not 

 find the best citizenship on the poorest soil. Good citizenship and good 

 soil run together. If you will study the eastern system, you will see that 

 Iowa needs to get awake on the maintenance of her soil fertility. When 

 I say that I also have in mind the broad matter of citizenship, which is 

 the principal thing we deal with. One of our state executives, in a speech 

 recently, said that these fields, hills and valleys which we see are not 

 Iowa, but that the people who live in these fields and in the towns consti- 

 tute the state of Iowa. He is partly right, but perhaps not wholly, be- 

 cause the character of the people depend upon the character of the soil 

 of Iowa, and if the soil of Iowa wasn't what it is the people who live in 

 Iowa would not be what they are — the two must go hand-in-hand. 



Too many farmers' organizations have not been successful for the 

 reason that they are not organized on a proper basis; they are political 

 rather than economical; destructive, too often, rather than constructive. 

 We are trying to avoid that; we are building on the basis of a county unit 

 with the state federation and the national federation, which is in process 

 of formation at the present time. Our aim in the state federation is not 



