ti68 



Journal of Agriculture, Victoria. [10 Sept., 1918. 



1 did not, owing to the shortage of time, go to the Massachusetts 

 Agricultural College. One cannot get the Spirit and inside working 

 of an agricultural college in less than three to five days' residence there, 

 and I was anxious to see the secondary schools at work and compare 

 them with our own agricultural high schools. T may say, however, that 

 Massachusetts has one of the hest colleges of agriculture in the East, and 

 its standard of entrance is equal to Harvard University — " the Oxford 

 of America." It has some 700 students going through the regular four- 

 year course for a degree. 



Massachusetts is quite a small State — about 5,000,000 acres — you 

 could pack it away in the Western District of Victoria. It cannot be 

 called an agricultural State, for the amount of produce it exports is 

 unusually small. Its population of 4,000,000 is dependent on the West 

 for its cereals, and for the large amount of fruit it imports. But it is 

 a State in which intensive agriculture is practised; dairying, truck 

 farming, and potato culture are the principal industries, but specialized 



The Essex County Agricultural School, Massachusetts. 



industries, such as fruit growing, onions, tobacco, asparagus, and cran- 

 berries have a firm hold. The distribution of these various types of 

 agriculture is based on the market conditions, and on the adaptability 

 of the soil. The fine sandy and silty soils of the Connecticut Valley 

 are deA^oted to tobacco and onions and garden crops. The sandy bogs 

 near Cape Cod are utilized for cranberries', whilst the dry ,sandy regions 

 are used for asparagus culture. The claj^ey soils in the central portion 

 of the State are adapted to hay and pasturage for dairy cows; the 

 mountainous western portion is devoted to forest products. 



Despite the fact that Massachusetts is not an agricultural State, it 

 supports a college of agriculture with over 700 regular students and 

 four special agricultural schools of secondary grade, and fourteen high 

 schools with departments of agriculture within the high schools. 



The equipment for these secondary schools and the cost of mainten- 

 ance are supplied partly by the State and partly by the County or High 

 ^School District. The State pays half, and the local people pay half, 



