ANNUAL MEETING OHIO STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 39 



Bring up the few schools that need bringing up and we will all be ready to 

 shout "Hurrah for the schools of Ohio." 



It don't pay to growl and grumble and have a grouch all over. The grouch 

 only makes himself and those about him miserable. Be up and do things. We 

 have a little realm all in itself. We may not have any mines that produce gold 

 bricks, gold bricks in more senses than one but we have deposits of iron ore and 

 coal the backbone of civilization. We have a soil which is rich in its possibili- 

 ties, and above all we have a sturdy citizenship which is bound to make Ohio 

 the finest place on earth in which to live. 



AN AGRICULTURAL SURVEY OF OHIO. 



BY L. H. GODDARD, 

 Department of Cooperation, Ohio Experiment Station. 



A WHEAT EXPERIMENT AND ITS LESSON. 

 Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen : 



If permissible I would like first to relate <*i little personal experience which 

 happened to me down on the farm in Fayette County a few years before I took up 

 my present work. A friend of mine, wishing to improve his wheat crop, finally 

 decided at my suggestion to purchase a few bushels of wheat as seed from the 

 Experiment Station. The selection -of the variety being left to me, I chose that 

 which had been rated by the Station at the end of a long series of experiments as 

 unqualifiedly the best, and did so with perfect assurance as to the ultimate results 

 of the use of this variety on my friend's farm. To my mind nothing but a 

 splendid outcome could follow the use of such seed by my friend or anyone else 

 in 'Ohio, for that matter. How could seed with such a stamp of approval fail in 

 any way? 



You will therefore judge of my pique when I tell you that the first year this 

 wheat produced only moderately well; in fact, not so well as some of the other 

 varieties in that neighborhood and indeed no better than the other variety in use 

 on the farm on which it was seeded. In defense of the variety and of the Experi- 

 r-ent Station, however, I tried to explain and succeeded in producing conviction 

 that the comparative failure was due probably to deficiency in preparation of the 

 seed-bed and perhaps to a certain extent to lack of climatic adjustment, and that 

 another year with more care used in seeding would tell a different story. 



I was correct in assuming that another year would tell a 'different story. 

 No man who saw the wheat at threshing time the second fall would question 

 that. The seed produced the previous year had been used on a selected field 

 carefully prepared and owing to the different and rather beautiful appear- 

 ance of the crop as it grew and the fact that it was situated close to the road 

 where it was observed by many in passing, the threshing results were await- 

 ed with great expectancy. My friends, the story which the threshing ma- 

 chine told the watching crowd on threshing day was, that the field which had 

 been given such care and seeded with this new special variety of wheat, had 

 produced about two-thirds of a crop and that crop quite largely screenings or 

 chicken feed. 



Such an experience as this is bound to make a very lasting impression on 

 one's mind. We can read with a certain amount of calmness of unfortunate expe- 

 riences which are sustained by others, but when such come home to us personally 

 and in the public manner in which this did to me, the effect is apt to be very 



