Agricultural Education. 



480 



[November, 1910. 



combined, on wheels, is of great value 

 wherever it has been and is carried into 

 effect. The thing has been done in 

 many of our American States with the 

 most beneficial results to both the farm- 

 ing communities that profited by the 

 progressive education, most philanthro- 

 pically carried among them free of cost, 

 and to the railroads who handled the 

 largely increased farm products result- 

 ing from this most valuable itinerant 

 teaching of the new and proper ideas in 

 farming, 



But in commencing this instructive 

 business the Southern Pacific, and all 

 other of our railroads that see fit to 

 wisely venture into it in this State, will 

 have to do three things before they can 

 reap the full rewards of this worthy 

 enterprise. 



First, it will be necessary to carry 

 around their corps of instructors and 

 practical demonstrators to teach those 

 farmers, who are unfortunately behind 

 the time in their methods, what are the 

 most profitable crops to plant in given 

 localities, how to grow them through 

 intensive cultivation, how to diversify 

 them so as to furnish family support at 

 home and to evenly meet the commercial 

 demands for the divers crops, how to 

 fertilise their fields with farm-yard and 

 commercial fertilisers, and how to keep 

 up and advance their fertility through 

 the most advantageous rotation with 

 leguminous crops. 



The second branch of this business 

 will be for the railroads to take active 

 steps in the line of immigration and 

 transport to the farming regions of the 

 State a sufficient supply of farmers to 

 cultivate and develop all the countless 

 thousands of acres of farming lands pene- 

 trated by and contiguous to the lines of 

 the railroads most largely interested in 

 the first part of the original scheme. 

 When they bring into the country a suffi- 

 cient farming population to fully develop 

 it then their instructive and demon- 

 strative trains will be proportionately 

 just that much more profitable to 

 the railroads themselves. For having 

 so many more farmers to teach the 

 progressive and productive modern 



farming ideas, those many more farmers 

 will produce very much more crop 

 freights to be hauled. 



The third division of this scheme 

 would be to considerably cheapen the 

 existing charges on the transportation 

 of farm produce in this State, parti- 

 cularly of a bulky raw product such as 

 sugar cane from the farmers' field to 

 the central factories. In that respect 

 the railroads might lower their freight 

 tax on the farming from ten to twenty 

 dollars an acre according to variation of 

 distance down to five or ten dollars an 

 acre. 



The original and initial part of the 

 idea under discussion is a splendid 

 scheme, as we have already stated. But 

 to perfect it and make it satisfactorily 

 splendid to all concerned it will be 

 absolutely essential to carry out the 

 second and third branches of this enter- 

 prise as well as the first. 



Louisiana has only one human being, 

 be it man, woman, child or babe, black, 

 white, or amalgamated, Christian, 

 Hebrew, churchman or heathen, to every 

 twenty acres of its land, the most 

 fertile on this continent. It has only 

 one male head of a family to every 

 hundred acres of its incomparable rich 

 soil. 



What the State needs first and most 

 is the farming population to fully 

 cultivate its cleared fields and to reclaim 

 and work the vast area of its waste 

 places. Our several great trunk lines 

 of railroads that terminate in its chief 

 city can do no better for the State in 

 general and themselves in particular 

 than to bend all their powerful energies 

 toward helping to populate its fields 

 with an industrial and highly desirable 

 class of white farmers. 



Then the trains of instruction and 

 demonstrative agricultural teaching 

 might be run at far greater profit to all 

 concerned than through regions contain- 

 ing a comparatively sparse population. 



Of course it is a business of great and 

 mutual benefit to run them now ; and it 

 is a move worthy of the hearty com- 

 mendation of every private citizen in 

 the State of Louisiana. 



