164 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



the lecturer will give some reason for it. Starting with a 

 small New England farm and working our way along as we 

 could, the time came when we needed additional help, when 

 we needed brains as well as muscle. I have had more or less 

 of college boys to work on the farm, and I have tried to lead 

 them up into farm superintendents. Branching out and going 

 South, it became necessary to have a farm superintendent, 

 and, while I have had a great many boys from college, I 

 have not yet found one that made a real good, efficient 

 superintendent. The boys that are not smart enough to 

 make a living on the farm they send to college. 



President Goodell. A man may be a first-rate scholar, 

 and not know how to handle men. 



Mr. Hale. I want a good farm superintendent; I will 

 pay him all he is worth. In my operations I have always 

 been a good deal of a crank on fertilizers, and, with more 

 than a thousand acres under the plough at the present time, 

 it is a very important problem with us. I thought of the 

 successful town we have here and of the successful manu- 

 facturers, and the thought came to me that in these great 

 mills, where there is so much at stake and where so much is 

 being spent yearly, if some chemist should come along and 

 say that he could take out of yonder stream what they are 

 ] laying twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year for, they 

 would say, " Mr. Chemist, go at it; show us how it is 

 done." They would pay almost any amount of money to 

 gather out of the stream what they are paying thousands of 

 dollars for. The stations have said, " Fellow farmers, you 

 are paying fifteen and twenty cents a pound for what you 

 have right on your own land, and you keep on paying that 

 price. Don't you need the money as much as these manu- 

 facturers do ? Is farming so good a business that you do 

 not need to listen to these things ? " The trouble, it seems 

 to me, is that the farmers do not grasp the situation, do not 

 take hold of it. I have not done one-quarter as much as I 

 ought. I have sometimes turned in as many as fifty acres in 

 one year. I do not mean to have an idle acre of land in the 

 summer. I cannot afford it. I am poor. I have got to save 

 all I can. These nitrogen traps are most valuable to us, 



