DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 



ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN 

 Commissioner of Education 



The pioneer farmers of America had a double interest in 

 life. First and foremost, they were pioneers, with all of the 

 dangers and excitements of that pioneer life. Secondarily, 

 they were farmers. It was hard and rude and unskilful, the 

 farming in which they were engaged, but it gave them the necessi- 

 ties of life. When the first dull opposition of nature was over- 

 come, when cabins had been built and woodlands cleared and 

 the plow had in some way done its first work, the soil showed 

 itself responsive and fertile enough. For a time, at least, life 

 was easier. But the zest of pioneering was gone, and the more 

 adventurous of our people soon moved on to the West, where 

 they might feel the thin edge of civilization still cutting its earliest 

 way through raw nature and barbarism, and know that that 

 keen edge was their own life and endeavor. The farmers who 

 remained behind were now farmers only and no longer pioneers. 

 They saw the first rank fertility of the soil fall back into more 

 moderate bounds. Their life became tame and binding. New 

 wants arose with the rise of new social relations. A few in every 

 community were able, by insight and energy, to keep still in the 

 forefront of things in that new age, but for many the occupa- 

 tion which made up the greater part of their life had become 

 an unpromising, uninspiring, unenlightened servitude. In this 

 jubilee today we are to recall the ways in which new zest has 

 been brought into the depressed life of the American farmer, the 

 ways in which his farm has been made part of a new frontier, 

 and he has been made once more a pioneer. 



At first the improvement of our husbandry was the work of a 



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