ILLUSTRATION FARMS OF THE COMMITTEE ON LANDS 5 



APPENDIX No. 3 



only an occupation to be followed by individuals for profits, but it is also a great 

 national interest, having a dominating bearing on the fortunes of the nation, in all 

 important ways — in the character of its population, in the possessions and prosperity 

 of its citizens and in the permanence of opportunities for all its people to earn 

 satisfactions in all lines of activity. 



THE QUESTION OF LOCAL ORGANIZATION. 



Let me return to the last page of the schedule for a moment. Of the 1,212 farms 

 dealt with, a few emerged as instances of good farming, prominently better than others. 

 The neighbours agree that these are better farms and that the owners of them farm 

 better than they do. By means of the survey this year and next year, we desire to 

 obtain more information as to the causes of their superiority and of their progress. 

 Everyone admits the fact that they are superior. Our survey during two years has 

 brought out some of the causes. We desire to learn to Avhat extent these causes can 

 he applied to all the other farms. We expect that a number of these most successful 

 farmers will be willing to furnish a statement of their accounts and of the balance 

 sheets from their farming operations. This is not a question of compelling the 

 information or of prying into personal affairs for no useful purpose. We have found 

 these natural leaders among the farmers willing and anxious to co-operate for the 

 benefit of their locality. The idea of the Committee on Lands is to get the attention 

 of the farmers of a locality directed with expectation, not to a show farm, but to the 

 farm or farms of which the balance sheet shows a large margin of profit and a satis- 

 factory condition of fertility and freedom from weeds. We have foimd the farmers 

 to be most friendly and helpful in all this. In the second year, many of them who 

 had weeds and diseased plants on their farms had specimens ready for the visit of the 

 collector. He was not an unwelcome guest, but was expected and helped in all his 

 duties. That itself is a promise of progress in co-operation. ISTo farm.er refused the 

 information sought. A few farmers were indifferent and thought the whole effort to 

 be only so much useless official recording; but the bulk of the farmers saw the mean- 

 ing of it and are expecting real benefits from it. 



In the last sheet of the schedule we have records of instances of good farming. 

 In each group of farms there stood out prominently a few farms as being manifestly 

 better than the others. They were evidently better in condition of the fields as to 

 cleanness and fertility and also in quantity and quality of the crops. The records 

 were taken according to the scale of points; and on each group a few stand out con- 

 spicuously above the rest. In each group of about thirty farms there can be picked 

 out two, three, and sometimes four farms which are decidedly superior in condition 

 and in management to the other farms which were around them. The gist of what I 

 want to lay before you leads up to this: how can we help to make the systems, the 

 methods, and the conditions, and the results in profits, of those best farms become 

 common on the other farms? It is not a question of creating a new Government 

 department that I am going to speak of, it is not a question of furnishing more 

 scientific instruction from headquarters; it is a question of local organization, of 

 local self-help, whereby the systems and methods practised on the best farms in a 

 locality will permeate and prevail throughout the whole locality. Some other 

 countries are far ahead of us in that. We are just beginning to do something in that 

 direction. 



HELPFUL AGENCIES. 



These men are not unmindfvil of the value of the agencies which hitherto have 

 contribiited to bring about as good a state of agriculture as we now have in Canada. 

 The credit is first of all due to the farmers themselves and their families. They 

 have received assistance from many sources. The Dominion Experimental Farms and 



