farmers' institutes. 25 



FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



So important has this question of the relation of the stations to farm- 

 ers' institutes become that this Office has during the past year more 

 than ever given attention to this matter. As the result of our inquiries 

 we are more fully convinced than ever before of the importance of 

 the farmers' institutes as agencies for the education of our farmers. 

 They should be liberally supported and in many parts of our country 

 should be much more thoroughly organized than at present. Accord- 

 ing to the incomplete statistics of the institutes collated by this Office, 

 they are now held annually in 43 States and Territories. In 19 of 

 these they are in charge of officers in agricultural colleges or experi- 

 ment stations; in 17 they are under State or county officials, and in 7 

 they are under the joint control of State officers and college and station 

 officers. In the aggregate -about 2,000 farmers' institutes are annually 

 held in the United States, which are attended by over half a million 

 farmers. 



In a few of our States the farmers' institutes are quite thoroughly 

 organized, have liberal financial support, and reach the farmers 

 quite widely, but in many States and in the Territories the move- 

 ment is yet in a comparatively weak condition and the organiza- 

 tion and means for this work are inadequate. Moreover, even in the 

 States where the institutes are most thoroughly organized and have 

 had the greatest success, new problems relating to their management 

 have arisen with the growth of the movement. For example, there is 

 increasing difficulty in some States in securing workers thoroughly 

 qualified for this kind of service who can attract large audiences of 

 farmers and hold their attention through the meetings. It is a common 

 experience that after the institutes have been held for a number of 

 years in a given locality the farmers are not so ready to listen to local 

 speakers, or those who have nothing to give to them except what has 

 come within the range of their own limited personal experience, how- 

 ever successful they may have been as practical farmers. This is 

 easily explained as a natural result of successful institutes. They 

 arouse the interest of intelligent farmers in the improvement of their 

 art and set them to studying the progress of agriculture as it "is shown 

 in the agricultural press, recent books, and the publications of the 

 experiment stations, boards of agriculture, and the United States 

 Department of Agriculture. In this way these men discover that the 

 problems of the farm can not be settled off-hand by individuals, how- 

 ever successful they may be in a limited range of practice, but that 

 the solution of these problems requires long-continued investiga- 

 tion and the joint labors of many scientific and practical workers. 



RELATION TO THE STATIONS. 



Farmers demand, therefore, that institute workers shall have a wide 

 range of knowledge regarding the science and practice of agriculture 



