698 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



selling right here in Deep River at $1 per bushel. The same was true 

 of other vegetables. Again, in the cities there are hundreds of people 

 who pick their living out of the garbage barrels. Children are sent early 

 in the morning hours to get the best of the refuse that falls from the 

 tables of the more fortunate, and there is actual strife to see who gets 

 the choicest of the rotten bananas and apples that are cast out. What a 

 pity! If these people, parents and children, could be sent out of the 

 cities onto some of the idle acres just mentioned and become self sup- 

 porting and producers of something, it would be a step forward and 

 would help to solve the problem. 



It will be discovered some day that one reason for the present crisis 

 is the desire of young men and women to get along without producing 

 anything. The country districts has been depopulated of young men and 

 women who would, with proper training, become good farmers and 

 farmers' wives to go to the city to make poor clerks and poorer stenog- 

 raphers — endeavoring to make a living with their brains, instead of with 

 their hands and brains properly trained to produce something useful. 

 They produce nothing and add not a penny to the wealth of the commun- 

 ity, yet they have to be fed and clothed by the workers at useful, produc- 

 tive employment. Year after year this toll of active, rugged, healthful 

 youth has been poured into the city hopper, until the supply has ex- 

 ceeded the demand, and every means at hand should be resorted to to make 

 an end of it. Wealth comes from the ground. Let our big urban popu- 

 lation diminish and get back to the land where men, women and children 

 can become producers of something useful, and which adds to the wealth 

 of the state and nation, and the problem of the high cost of living will 

 solve itself as easily as the high prices have been brought about by doing 

 the opposite. 



AGRICULTURE IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 



READ BEFORE THE POWESHIEK COUNTY FARMERS' INSTITUTE MRS. T. B. LIGHT. 



To gain a correct idea of the present status of agricultural education 

 in the public schools, a general survey of the inception and growth of the 

 movement will be instructive, although space in this brief paper must 

 necessarily be limited. 



Public school agriculture began with the establishing of school gardens 

 in Germany over eighty years ago, and so rapidly did the value of the 

 movement become apparent to the educators of the continent that in less 

 than forty years after the opening of the first school, over 100,000 such 

 gardens were in active operation. At the present time actual gardens and 

 practical schools of agricultural instruction are found in nearly every 

 country in Europe, — in the colonial dependencies of England, India, Can- 

 ada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and South America,— in fact in every 

 country that counts education one of the necessities of the people. 



School gardening in Europe differs much from our ideas of the work, 

 being much more comprehensive. For instance, several years ago, Rus- 

 sia reported 11.000 fruit trees, 22,000 forest trees and 1,000 hives of bees 



