Photograph by A. H. Blackiston 

 SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE HOUSTON PRESENTING WALTER LEE DUNSON A DIPLOMA 

 AS THE CHAMPION BOY CORN GROWER OF THE UNITED STATES 



only about 15 per cent of the total landed 

 area of the world, it has been demon- 

 strated that with scientific agriculture this 

 area itself might suffice to feed a pop- 

 ulation vastly greater than that now 

 living. 



With all of her teeming millions, only 

 18 per cent of Asia's land, 12 per cent of 

 that of the Americas and Africa. 27 per 

 cent of that of Europe, and 5 per cent of 

 that of Australia have ever felt the touch 

 of the plow. Without encroaching at all 

 upon the world's forests, but using only 

 the steppes, pampas, savannas, and prairie 

 lands, there might be added to the earth's 

 farming lands an area twice as great as 

 that now under active agricultural op- 

 erations. 



The United States has been working 

 along lines looking more to the extension 

 of scientific methods to the present culti- 

 vated acreage, than to the extension of 



farm operations to new acreage. The 

 bulk of the $30,000,000 it now spends an- 

 nually, through its Department of Agri- 

 culture, is for the improvement of farm- 

 ing methods. In latter years a program 

 for the taking of the gospel of good farm- 

 ing to the farmer himself, and demon- 

 strating it in practice, instead of writing 

 it down upon paper, has been productive 

 of very wonderful results. 



In the club work of the last fiscal year 

 hundreds of county agents of the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, working in thirty- 

 three States, went out upon the farm and 

 showed the farmers themselves how to 

 increase their yields. The thousands of 

 farmers who accepted the offer to farm 

 under the direction of the Department of 

 Agriculture increased their yield of corn 

 nine bushels per acre, their wheat seven 

 bushels per acre, and their oats ten bush- 

 els per acre. 



