1901 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
3 
THE FARM INSTITUTES OF WISCONSIN. 
Of ihe Farmer and for the Farmer. 
During the first three months of the coming year 
there occur in Wisconsin 101 meetings, composed of 
the most intelligent and wideawake farmers in the 
State. For two days, through five sessions of two 
hours each, these men and women will discuss in an 
intelligent manner, the topics of greatest interest to 
them, relating experiences of past efforts and sug¬ 
gesting methods for the future. All of these discus¬ 
sions are led in the right direction and controlled by 
a “conductor,” who suggests the topics and opens the 
way by a 20-minute talk. These conductors are all 
practical farmers, owning and successfully operating 
farms in Wisconsin. In many instances a cooking 
school is held in connection with the other meetings, 
conducted by an expert cook. In these, the line of 
work is of quite as great interest as the other meet¬ 
ings. This, in brief, is an outline of the farm-insti¬ 
tute work in this State. This is the fifteenth year 
of the existence of this branch of agricultural educa¬ 
tion, during which time over 1,500 meetings have been 
held. The institute work is one of the three main di¬ 
visions of the Agricultural College of the State Uni¬ 
versity, the experiment station and the college courses 
comprising the other two. Of these three, the experi¬ 
ment station is designed to solve some of the problems 
of greatest import to the farmer. Well-trained ex¬ 
perts are constantly at work 
aiming to discover Nature’s se¬ 
crets. How may we most easily 
unlock the plant food in the soil? 
What is the history of these mil¬ 
lions of organisms in a drop of 
milk, and how can we control or 
destroy them? All these things 
accrue to the good of the farmer, 
but they are of necessity slowly 
evolved, and the end sought is 
too often obscured by terms and 
methods not familiar to him. 
The college courses are more 
popular, especially the short 
course, which is patronized al¬ 
most wholly by farmers’ sons, 
but not every one can come to 
Madison even for 14 weeks in the 
Winter. Therefore further to ex¬ 
tend the work, the institute sys¬ 
tem of agricultural education has 
been devised, to bring to the very 
doors, as it were, the information 
needed, and an opportunity foi 
the interchange of ideas. The 
largely-increased attendance at 
the meetings, the enthusiasm 
manifested, as well as the grow¬ 
ing demand for meetings, is evi¬ 
dence of the popularity and value 
of the work. The institutes are 
located only on petition, the peti¬ 
tioners agreeing to furnish a 
meeting place with heat and 
light, the central management 
attending to the rest. One hun¬ 
dred and fifty-one petitions were 
received last year, but the means 
at command allowed of only 101 
meetings. One hundred of these 
were located in the remoter parts 
of the State, and mainly in new 
territory, while the last or “round-up” meeting is 
usually held in one of the larger towns. This is an 
event of very considerable importance and very large¬ 
ly attended. For this occasion, “imported talent” is 
largely employed, and a Winter fair or exhibition of 
farm products is held, with a prize list offered by the 
merchants of the town. The proceedings of the 
“round-up” are printed in full in book form, to be dis¬ 
tributed free to all interested. This is an extremely 
popular publication and the annual edition of 60,009 
copies is always exhausted before a new one is issued. 
By an enactment of the Legislature, one copy is sent 
to each school district in the State, to be put in the 
school library. The distribution is effected in pan 
through the agricultural press of the State, as the pub¬ 
lishers forward the book to subscriber, on request. 
While the general supervision and control of the 
work is in the hands of tne regents of the University, 
the real direction is delegated by them to a superin¬ 
tendent. It is plain that the success or failure of the 
work must depend largely upon this superintendent. 
For the past six years this position has been filled 
by Mr. George McKerrow. The splendid success of 
the work and the increased confidence and interest 
are the best evidence of his fitness for the position. 
Another evidence is his large stock farm operated very 
successfully by him for many years, previous to tak¬ 
ing up the institute work. As a breeder of purebred 
horses, cattle and sheep, he has been well-known to 
NAQAMl OR OVAL KUMQUAT. Pig. 3. See Rurai.isms, Page 6. 
the stockmen of the State for over a quarter of a cen¬ 
tury. The students of the short course, when en¬ 
gaged in competitive stock-judging, never fail to visit 
the McKerrow farm, for here may be found one of the 
finest fiocks of purebred sheep in the Northwest. Mr. 
McKerrow is a man of excellent attainments and 
knows farming and the farmers of Wisconsin, and 
gets very close to them in his work. The same Is 
true of the conductors. Their talks are not those of 
the man who gleans from the written work of others, 
and adds to this his own dreams of the way things 
ought to be, while his own barn door is off the hinges 
and his cattle are subsisting on such protein and 
carbohydrates as may be found in the straw stack. It 
cannot be justly charged against any man connected 
with the institute work that he is not a successful, 
practical farmer, and herein lies the secret of the 
grand success of the work; it is of the farmers, for the 
farmers and by the farmers. It costs the people of 
the State $12,000 a year to maintain the institutes, 
one-half of which is absorbed by the expense of print¬ 
ing of 60,000 copies of the bulletin. A portion of the 
returns may be found in the census statistics of Wis- 
consinis farm products, but the larger benefits are 
not thus expressed. The knowledge derived, the pow¬ 
er accruing from this knowledge and the contentment 
following, are not reducible to any form available to 
the census taker. The institutes in Wisconsin are free 
from any political taint whatever. Only once did the 
politician ever attempt to gain admission, and then 
the door was slammed in his face so forcibly that no 
further attempt has ever been made. 
FREDERIC CRANEFIELD. 
A DOMESTIC SCIENCE MAN. 
A woman who is studying domestic science work 
sent us, through a friend, a chart from which the 
drawing shown at Fig. 3 was made. The following 
lines were written under the chart; 
See this new and beautiful man 
Made on a domestic-science plan! 
Water makes up most his weight, 
Proteid as I indicate; 
Mineral matter is also gp'eat. 
Just a little of carbohydrate. 
Fats are needed, may I state? 
What he is I leave to fate. 
We trust that fate will be kind to this poor com¬ 
bination of water, minerals, fat and proteids, and If 
fate take the form of a domestic-science woman such 
kindness is probably assured. The man weighs 145 
pounds. Of this 99 pounds, or 68 per cent is water. 
As he puts on fat this proportion of water will grow 
larger. It may shock some of our solid citizens to be 
informed that they are composed so largely of fiuid, 
but it should be an Incentive to them to make up the 
proportion of solid matter by putting more sand or 
mineral matter in character and will. 
PEACH TREES ON BLACK WALNUT ROOTS. 
A Big Story from Kentucky. 
Not long since I was attending the State horticul¬ 
tural meeting in Elizabethtown, Ky., the county seat 
of Hardin County, which is in the Blue-grass region, 
and noted for its fine horses and rye whisky. Before 
the hour for the meeting to convene I was introduced 
to the various officials in the court house, and among 
others to the county judge. Being a very genial and 
communicative old gentleman, and knowing that I 
was there in the interests of fruit culture, he very 
kindly proceeded to tell me of the fruit industry in 
Hardin County. He began by announcing that I 
might not know that the largest and best peaches in 
the whole country grew there. He said they had been 
sold as high as $12.50 per bushel, and that I might 
know just how thej grew such fine peaches he said 
the trees were “grown on Black-walnut roots.” At 
this rare information I smiled audibly and said: “See 
here. Judge, don’t try to guy me in that way; no kind 
of peach tree will grow on any such root.” This evi¬ 
dently nettled him, for was he not the judge of the 
county court, and his honor and veracity unimpeach¬ 
able? The latter I did not doubt and I respected his 
white head, but I ai once thought of the close prox 
imity of the Ohio nurserymen who have such mar¬ 
velous peach trees and other things to sell, and that 
possibly they had been doing missionary work in 
Kentucky. So I asked the Judge 
whether they had not been fa¬ 
vored with those wonderful trees 
from north of the Ohio River. 
“Oh! no,” he said, “they are 
budded right here. We have 
men who know all about fruit 
culture. You know the peach 
borers do not work in Black wal¬ 
nut roots, and the trees grow 
wonderfully in our rich soil.” 
To this I could only reply, that 
I did not doubt his belief in this 
new mode of growing peaches, 
but that I did not; and I bade 
him good morning after some 
conversation on other topics, 
leaving him of the firm convic¬ 
tion that I was a hardened disbe¬ 
liever in the greatest secret of 
modern peach culture. 
A few days later I was at a 
meeting of the Maryland Horti¬ 
cultural Society in Baltimore an;! 
there confided the secret method 
to Roland Morrill, of Michigan; 
j. H. Hall, of Connecticut, and 
other noted peach growers who 
were present; but somehow they 
did not say they would adopt it. 
With all the eloquence I could 
command I tried to show Mr. 
Morrill the advantage of $12.50 
per bushel over the $7.50 he was 
able to get for the best of his 
peaches in 1899, but it was all in 
vain. Perhaps our friend. Prof. 
Massey, of North Carolina, will 
catch on to the idea, and try it 
for growing new-fangled pears 
or quinces. Doubtless all the 
pears or quinces grown on Black- 
walnut stocks in North Carolina 
or elsewhere, will have seeds nearly as large as 
walnuts and with kernels as rich as butter and as 
sweet as honey. For, why will not “the new horti¬ 
culture” work as well in North Carolina as it does 
in Kentucky? h. e. van deman. 
A STEAM HORSE IN CALIFORNIA. 
We have been using one of the Daniel Best’s 50- 
horse-power traction steam engines for seven years, 
and it has proved a grand success for plowing, har¬ 
rowing and pulling a combined harvester. In plow¬ 
ing, we pull with it 16 10-inch plows, and plow about 
40 acres per day. In harrowing, we pull enough har¬ 
rows to cut the width of 60 feet, and harrow about 
150 acres per day. In harvesting, we pull a combined 
harvester, with a cut of 25 feet, and have cut, 
thrashed, cleaned and put into bags ready for mar¬ 
ket 80 acres of wheat, 1,155 bags, 164,010 pounds, in 
one day. We cut and thrash about 3,000 acres of 
grain every season. In regard to the pushing or pull¬ 
ing of headers or binders we will say that they are 
entirely out of use in this part of California. We 
have never used our engine for hauling loads to mar¬ 
ket, as we are on the banks of the Sacramento River, 
and ship all our produce to San Francisco by river. 
However, these engines are used in lumber camps for 
hauling logs to the sawmills, and also in the southern 
part of the State for hauling salt and ore. There are 
six of these engines In use here in a radius of 12 miles 
and there would be more of them but that the price 
is $7,000, including the combined harvester, the en¬ 
gine alone costing $5,000. boter bros. 
California. 
