158 
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 
[Vol. 11 
scarce. In the face of this demand made upon us, we must admit that 
the successful prosecution of extension work in applied entomology 
upon a project basis is still in the pioneer stage. This work has been 
carried out heretofore without prearranged plans and has been more or 
less sporadical as the needs of it were felt. Until recently the exten¬ 
sion work in entomology has been of the nature of emergency work 
done by members of the Federal Department of Agriculture or State 
Experiment Station staff who have served in the capacity of members of 
a fire department subject to call upon the receipt of distress signals. 
These men have frequently arrived in time to find the crop already 
devastated, or at least so severely injured that little could be saved. 
As they are engaged in research work it is but natural (and the writer 
has been in this position) that they be more interested in getting infor¬ 
mation from the field than in giving it to the farmers. The time they 
could give to this work was necessarily limited and they have often 
been unable to outline and disseminate a plan of procedure that should 
prevent a recurrence of the trouble in question. Because these men 
have not been able to spend sufficient time in the field, farming inter¬ 
ests have suffered heavily in the past through the state agricultural 
colleges and Federal Department of Agriculture being uninformed con¬ 
cerning insect injuries that are taking place. 
The present shortage of some of our foods for export and home use 
has resulted in a realization on our part of the service we can ren¬ 
der, and as a result many new men have been entrusted, during the 
past year, with the duty of taking our science to the field. This will 
probably result in extension entomology taking its place along with 
research and teaching work in all of the states. 
The several entomologists now working under the federal and state 
Smith-Lever funds find one of their first problems to be the working 
out and successful prosecution of a definite project. The writer after 
spending four years in state extension work with entomology has come 
to the conclusion that this is not only the first but the main problem, 
and upon it will depend the success or failure of extension work. The 
difficulty encountered lies not so much in knowing how to plan the 
work, but to work the plan, which will have for its main object the re¬ 
duction in amount of the emergency work to be done. This necessi¬ 
tates a thorough knowledge of state-wide crop conditions and working 
always just ahead of an insect outbreak if such threatens. For ex¬ 
ample, the men engaged in extension entomology in Kansas were pre¬ 
paring during the fall of 1917 for the grasshopper campaign of 1918, 
by locating and circulating knowledge of the egg-laying places of 
grasshoppers in western Kansas. This publicity was being done al¬ 
most entirely by means of attractive exhibits of these grasshopper eggs 
