Part II.] RELATION OF THE RAILROAD. 105 



veloped and highly efficient tractors which are now used to 

 great advantage, both for plowing and harvesting, on the small 

 farms as well as on the large. Figures are not available show- 

 ing the number of miles covered by trains of this character 

 throughout the country, but they must run into the hundreds 

 of thousands a year, and testimony is abundant as to the 

 benefits derived. 



The principle involved is the same as in that of the demon- 

 stration farm, namely, that the actual exhibition of the process 

 involved stamps upon the mind a more lasting impression than 

 any amount of reading of bulletins or agricultural papers can 

 do. 



Several of the western railroads and a few in the cast have 

 made a practice for several years of keeping in constant em- 

 ployment a corps of agricultural experts who devote their 

 entire time to visiting the individual farmers along their lines, 

 getting well acquainted with them, and, by personal contact, 

 inducing them to experiment on their own land with new scien- 

 tific methods, in that way adding to visual demonstration the 

 important element of personal persuasion, which often is a 

 most important factor, as we all know, in any line of endeavor. 



Most of the methods in question are more or less familiar 

 to all of you, and I will not stop to dwell upon them in the 

 general terms that would be necessary, but with your permis- 

 sion will proceed to give you something more at first hand in 

 describing the activities of our own company, with which I 

 have been identified from the start, in the development of 

 agriculture in the region reached by its line, principally in the 

 State of New York. 



About the year 1910 Mr. W. H. Truesdale, the president of 

 our company, himself a western man and before coming east 

 the general manager of one of the largest of the western granger 

 roads, became impressed with the way in which our national 

 food production was being overtaken by domestic consumption, 

 so that not only was the margin for export rapidly reaching 

 the vanishing point, but the unprecedented condition appar- 

 ently approaching when America would not produce enough 

 foodstuffs for her growing population. It was about this time 

 that the "back to the farm" and many other visionary, if 



