182 BACKGROUND AND MEANS OF SERVICE 



ing to their concept of the movement. His farmer con- 

 stituents usually judged him by the service that he ren- 

 dered their respective communities. He was variously 

 looked upon by them as a college man or "book farmer/' 

 and therefore a useless and expensive luxury, a real expert 

 or specialist, and consequently as a valuable source of in- 

 formation, or, by still others as just another agent and in 

 the class with the peddlers of books or lightning rods. 

 Some states there were whose people regarded the county 

 agent wholly as a public officer, while others would have the 

 management of his work partly in the hands of those he 

 chiefly served, the members of the county farmers' asso- 

 ciation. The evolution of these various points of view to a 

 more or less common ground is a most interesting study. 



The United States Department of Agriculture had from 

 the first looked upon the county agent as i^s own local rep- 

 resentative among farmers and as a disseminator and a 

 teacher of the information which its scientists and repre- 

 sentatives had discovered and gathered. This is well shown 

 in the Department's Bulletin 259, issued in October, 1912, 

 by W. J. Spillman, then in charge of the work, which gives 

 as the objects of county agent work: 



(1) To carry to the farmer the results of scientific re- 

 search in his behalf, as well as the results of experience of 

 other farmers and to aid the farmer in applying these re- 

 sults to his work, and 



(2) To reorganize and redirect the agriculture of the 

 various sections of the country. 



A good many persons in the Department, and in the 

 Congress as well, apparently regarded the farmer as one 

 badly in need of scientific information, which if he only had 



