THE DEMONSTRATION WORK 



"We have accumulated in the agricultural colleges and in the 

 Department of Agriculture sufficient agricultural information which, 

 if made available to the farmers of this country and used by them, 

 would work a complete and absolute revolution in the social, economic 

 and financial conditions of our rural population. The great problem 

 we are up against now is to find the machinery by which we can link 

 up the man on the farm with these various sources of information. 

 We have expended in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars 

 in the last half century gathering together valuable agricultural 

 truths. We have been spending 50 years trying to find an efficient 

 agency for spreading this information throughout the country and 

 putting it into the hands of the people for whom it was collected. 

 We have tried the Farmers' Bulletin. We have tried the press. We 

 have tried the lecture and the Institute work. All of these agencies 

 have done good. They have been efficient in a measure, but there is 

 not an agricultural student in the country who does not realize that 

 the greatest Efficiency is not being had from these agencies. This bill 

 proposes to set up a system of general demonstration teaching 

 throughout the country, and the agent in the field of the department 

 and college is to be the mouthpiece through which this information 

 will reach the people — the man and woman and the boy and girl on 

 the farm. You cannot make the farmer change the methods which 

 have been sufficient to earn a livelihood for himself and his family 

 for many years unless you show him, under his own vine and fig tree, 

 as it were, that you have a system better than the one which he him- 

 self has been following. 



The plan proposed in this bill undertakes to do that by personal 

 contact, not by writing to a man and saying that this is a better plan 

 than he has or by standing up and talking to him and telling him it 

 is a better plan, but by going onto his farm, under his own soil and 

 climatic conditions, and demonstrating here that you have a method 

 which surpasses his in results. 



The system of demonstration teaching so far developed in this 

 country has confined its activities to the work of teaching the adult 

 farmer and in a limited way only, through the ' boys ' com clubs ' and 

 * girls' tomato clubs, ' the boys and girls on the farm. Your committee 

 believes that this bill furnishes the machinery by which the farm boy 

 and girl can be reached with real agricultural and home economic 



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