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New YorK AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 43 
toward the solution of any problem. Many agricultural localities 
are making great effort to secure summer boarders. This may aid 
a certain class of persons; but as the summer boarder advances into 
the open country, agriculture is likely to recede. 
Let us bear in mind that the questions of ineffective farming are 
not new. Just now the emphasis seems to be placed on the so-called 
abandonment of farms and on certain kinds of propaganda that 
promise to solve these difficulties. We have passed through many 
epochs or eras of agricultural propaganda, in each one of which 
some one factor was supposed to afford the means of relieving 
agricultural distress. I can recall many of these eras. I remember 
that at one time the emphasis in agricultural discussion was placed 
very largely on the farm mortgage, but we have now learned that 
a mortgage on a farm is not inherently different from a mortgage 
on any other property. I recall very well when the era of com- 
pounded fertilizers was at its height: all one had to do was to have 
the soil and plant analyzed, to determine the deficiencies, and then 
to prepare a medicine to cure the disorder. I remember the advent 
of farm machinery, which was supposed to be able to solve the 
farmer’s difficulties. I saw the beginning of spraying for insects 
and plant diseases, and it was figured up for us what losses we 
suffer from bugs that prey on our crops: it has cost us more to 
fight bugs than to fight Indians, counting the value of crops that 
they destroy; spraying would provide a remedy, and yet bugs are 
still with us. At one time the emphasis was placed on under- 
drainage, and we need a recrudescence of this teaching. In parts 
of the great West the emphasis is naturally placed on irrigation. 
We have looked to the rural free deliveries of mail as one of the 
great means of alleviating agricultural isolation and failure. The 
good-roads people have been sure that the lack of traversable high- 
ways is the cause of the so-called agricultural decline. Lately, 
various kinds of extension work have been strongly in the public 
mind. We are just now in the era of soil surveys and other soil 
studies. We are beginning to talk in a new way about the old and 
yet unknown subject of farm management. We are talking freely 
of social questions, without knowing just what they are. 3 
Every one of these epochs has placed us on a higher plane, and 
yet we have never heard more about agricultural decline than within 
the past ten and twenty years, notwithstanding that this is the 
very time when the agricultural colleges and experiment stations 
