II 



AGRICULTURE A LEARNED PROFESSION 



TO the city man, even if his boyhood was spent in 

 the country, farming is an unskilled profession. 

 In other words, anybody can be a farmer. If a farmer 

 should have a number of sons differing in mental ca- 

 pacity, he probably would take the one who had the 

 gift of speech for the purpose of making of him a 

 preacher or a lawyer, the one who believed in research 

 might be a scientist or a physician, while the one who 

 seemed to have no particular ability for anything would 

 be selected to stay upon the farm. If the facts of 

 farming were properly appreciated, quite a different 

 attitude w(5uld be manifested. The brightest and best 

 of the boys by all means should be kept upon the farm. 

 It is a fundamental error to suppose that farming is 

 neither a business nor a profession. It is a business 

 which requires the highest business talent, it is a pro- 

 fession which requires the best technical skill. It is 

 true that farming perhaps embraces a larger percentage 

 of unskilled men than any other profession, but that is 

 not the fault of farming itself. There is no other pro- 

 fession that requires such a variety of learning, such an 

 insight into nature, such skill of a technical kind in 

 order to be successful, as the profession of farming. 

 That this is recognized as a fact may be easily shown 

 by a few commonly recognized truths. 



All over the world schools of agriculture are multi- 

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