VOL. XI

No. 5

A

By ALBERT F. WOODS

The

GRICULTURE in the United States is at the beginning of a new epoch. The period of land expansion is gone. There is no more land to give away. Reclamation is expensive. The rich fertility has largely gone. period of great excess in food production is closing and the period of food production more nearly balanced with food requirement is opening. This means that food costs will increase until the proper balance between agriculture and other industries is reached. Some good economists claim that this new epoch will be characterized by food shortage. Doubtless in time we shall reach a stage when our farms can not produce the food needed at reasonable cost and maintain proper standards of living. We must look forward to such a possibility and prepare for it by improving our methods and conserving our resources at every point. If we do this, we shall be able to meet the food requirements of the United States for many years to come and have as much to export as we may find profitable markets for.

Colleges Preparing for New Responsibilities

It is evident that the new agriculture must be of increasing efficiency in every phase. The land-grant colleges have long been preparing for this. They are ready to take the step forward that the new responsibility requires. Our first step must be to get a clear understanding of the situation, then to aid in formulating policies that will promote the general welfare of our people.

Portions of presidential address before the Association of Land-Grant Colleges, Chicago, November 17,

1925.

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We must not only gather facts and evaluate them, but we must find and train the men and women for this service. How may this best be accomplished under the varying conditions in our respective States? It means a close working relation between the agencies of education, research, and extension.

Enlarged Program Involves Attention to Humanities

This enlarged program for our colleges involves more attention to the social sciences and the humanities, not merely for their cultural value, but as tools and methods of approach to our problems. History, sociology, psychology, language and literature, music, art, economics, as well as biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, and their applications, must find their places more and more in close relation to the more technical subjects in our land-grant college curricula. Our aim should be, not to separate but to fuse these methods of understanding and approach.

These are national problems requiring the cooperation of all the States with each other and with the Federal Government. This sort of cooperation in education and research is not domination or subsidy of the objectionable sort, but is a businesslike effort to stabilize the foundation of our national economic and social structure. Its successful outcome means for all our people a new era of unprecedented prosperity built on secure foundations.

What are some of the fundamentals essential to the development of agriculture?

1. It must yield a financial return commensurate with the skill and effort put into the work.

2. It must have at least as great stability as other industries.

3. It must furnish the elements necessary to satisfactory home and community life-viz, health, recreation, education, and spiritual growth.

4. It must offer opportunity to render a service needed and appreciated in which all of the highest possibilities of personality may be developed.

Agriculture has been in the past, and is at present, defective in greater or less degree in all of these factors. The opportunities and possibilities are there, but they have not been realized as fully as in other industries. Large numbers of our best young men and women are leaving the farms and going to the cities. Is this shift finally to result in a peasant type of population on our farms? This is certainly not an American ideal. If we are to have a prosperous and happy America, we must not only maintain the best that we have in our rural life, but we must correct its deficiencies, so as to attract and hold the highest type of farm population.

General Agreement on Certain Policies While the formulation of a national program for agriculture must be the product of careful study and investigation, there are, however, certain general policies on which there is already general agreement. These may be summarized as follows:

1. There must be general recognition of the fact that agriculture is a fundamental or primary industry. This is a public state of mind that must be maintained by education.

2. There must be general recognition of the fact that agriculture, like other 81

industries, must, as a whole, be main

tained in a prosperous condition if it is to attract and maintain efficient workers, produce efficiently, consume efficiently, and secure the necessary capital at reasonable terms. This, also, is a public state of mind that must be maintained by education.

3. The collection and distribution of accurate information as to supplies of staples on hand and probable needs during the next year is essential. This should be a national and State service, including the work of the International Institute of Agriculture. This world governmental agency, established by international agreement in 1905, works with a view to the reduction and elimination as far as possible of hazards in the production and distribution of agricultural products.

4. A commodity organization system must be developed to more effectively utilize the information necessary to efficient production and marketing.

5. The development of the means of prompt and dependable communicationradio, telephone, telegraph, post roads and railroads, air routes, etc., is essential.

6. Information sources must be developed and maintained.

7. Soil survey and land classification and utilization studies and programs must be completed.

8. The lands that should be in national, State, or municipal forests or parks, for stream protection, forest products, game and fish, birds and wild life, recreation, etc., must be surveyed and set apart for those purposes.

9. Lands best suited to commercial reforestation or farm woodlots, to meet timber needs must be determined. Elimination of lands not suited to permanent agriculture from specific crop production must be effected.

10. Areas should be mapped best suited to economical production and distribution of high quality products. Cooperative specialization should be secured in the production, grading, and sale of these products.

Markets near Source of Production

11. Dependable markets should be developed as near as possible to the source of production. The development especially of the home market and the protection of the home market as effectively as other industries and labor are protected are among the essentials.

12. These markets should be furnished with a dependable supply of the grades desired.

13. The market should be educated on the relative value of grades by honest advertising and by educational methods.

14. The development of improved methods of production is essential. Development by breeding of improved

varieties-better quality, better yield,

disease resistant, better adapted to soil or climate or other limiting factors must be encouraged.

15. Control of diseases and insect pests and elimination of wastes, large and small; improved machinery-standarized machinery parts; improvements in handling, transportation, and storage; better knowledge of and more scientific use of fertilizers and feeds are among the more important factors that must be controlled; improved educational facilities teachers, schools, extension education, radio, press, churches, etc., are essential.

Eliminate Unprofitable Equipment and Crops

16. Nonpaying "boarders" of all kinds-crops, machinery, acres, and livestocks must be eliminated. The lowgrade, inefficient farmer who has demonstrated inability to learn and cooperate with others must be eliminated. These produce the surplus of slovenly methods and do most of the howling.

17. Recognition of the interrelation of agriculture and other industries and the necessity of mutual understanding and cooperation between city and country must be emphasized.

18. The fact, proved by experience in all educational work, that the best education is that which teaches the individual how best to work out his own salvation must be recognized.

In short, get the facts and put them in the hands of men and women capable of using them intelligently.

The relation of the land-grant colleges to all of this, as already emphasized, is that they must find and train men and women to get the facts; then get the facts and demonstrate their value and application. Our three great functions are EDUCATION, RESEARCH, AND DEMONSTRATION.

Colleges Must Continue to be Leaders The land-grant colleges have been in the past, and must continue to be in the future, the leaders and organizers of better education and training for the industrial masses. Good schools and sound educational methods are essential to prosperity and progress. The way should be open as freely as possible to find one's place in the community and to make the best possible preparation to fill it. We can aid in developing sane plans of vocational guidance that will greatly help young people to start right and the older persons to readjust themselves to the advantage of all. It is the land-grant colleges especially that should give attention to this study. So far it has received very little attention by this group. The impetus given to the subject by the psychological tests during the World War has started a flood of

investigations in schools of all grades, as well as an attempt to make practical use of psychological tests in many industries.

Cooperation of Educational Foundations Desired

President Pearson called attention in his presidential address before this association last year to the necessity of a survey of our land-grant colleges and universities with a view to determining what changes, if any, should be made to make our work more effective in meeting the new problems and responsibilities that face us. I am in thorough sympathy with this suggestion. The only question in my mind is how best to plan and carry out the work. It will involve considerable expense. Should we ask the cooperation of one or more of the educational foundations, or the United States Bureau of Education, as our engineering schools have done, or should we organize the work cooperatively among ourselves? The United States Bureau of Education has made some excellent studies in various States. So have the Carnegie Foundation and the General Education Board. Some institutions have made very illuminating studies of themselves. The problem is in the hands of our executive committee, with President Pearson as chairman. We are, therefore, assured that the wisest procedure will be followed after full consideration.

Results of Trained Leadership are Apparent

Finally, let me say that American agriculture is rapidly emerging from its haphazard methods and unorganized state into organized commodity groups. It has available trained leadership in all branches of its work. It is improving its fact-finding and educational agencies. It is demanding and securing legislation that places it on an equality with other industries. It offers an increasing attraction, to young men and women who like its freedom and its challenge and its broad opportunities of worth-while service. It promises increasing financial reward and stability. It responds to the best thought and the best effort. It offers the opportunity to make the ideal home from which shall come not only those who will "carry on" in the country, but, as it has in the past, also those who will carry these ideals into the life of the city and help to maintain that mutual understanding and unselfish cooperation upon which the welfare of our Nation must rest.

Tuition fees in the State secondary schools of Czechoslovakia are graded according to the incomes of the parents of pupils.

Successful

T. LOUIS COUNTY, Minnesota, the heart of the Arrowhead country and literally the "land of the skyblue water," is unique in at least two ways among Minnesota's counties. It is the largest county in the State and one of the largest in the United States, having an area of 6,500 square miles and containing 106 congressional townships; and through special legislation it is provided with a biadministrative organization for rural schools; some schools operate under the plan in vogue in other parts of Minnesota and others are in "unorganized territory," under special laws not applicable in other counties.

It is a land of lakes and streams, from Lake Superior which it borders on the south through "the thousand lakes" to a cluster of lakes and streams forming the northern boundary. Once a land of great forests and splendid timber, it has been denuded of its riches by two destructive elements: (1) The great lumber corporations which have "cut over" the valuable timber without reforestation, and (2) the great forest fires of 1918. The latter swept nearly the entire area of St. Louis County, laying waste once valuable and beautiful forests, leaving thousands of dead trees standing like ghostly sentinels in the thick underbrush of new growths of the many varieties of native trees. In spite of desolation the natural romance of the north woods remains, especially when decked in autumn colorings with their contrast to the sky-blue of the abundant lakes and streams.

A Pioneer Land Full of Hardships Over approximately 4,000 square miles of the county known as "unorganized territory" school children are scattered with wide distances between families. The people wrest a scant living from the reluctant soil, supplemented in most cases by day work on roads, in mines, or at a variety of odd jobs. It is a pioneer land, full of hardships, unhampered by tradition, developing a sturdiness and initiative all its own.

In such a land of many children and little wealth the ordinary type of organization for school purposes, especially support, is inadequate. Minnesota's normal

By KATHERINE M. COOK Chief Rural Education Division, Bureau of Education school unit is the local district. Under conditions in St. Louis County a different scheme must be worked out to avoid school starvation. To a great extent the new type of organization was predetermined, since previous to the settlement of the unorganized territory many school districts had been formed and school systems developed some to a high degree of efficiency. Particularly was this true in the "Iron range country" running through the center of the county and rich in mineral deposits; the school districts there are rich to the point of opulence.

County taxation is not an important source of school support in Minnesota, the local district being the chief contributor. There is, however, a state-wide tax called the county school tax of 1 mill collected by county authorities and returned by them to the credit of the different school districts exactly as collected. Generous State funds are apportioned in large part by way of special subvention to promote particular activities, as libraries, transportation, standard buildings, and the like. Although some of these subventions are equalizing in nature and effect, it is only through meeting certain stated requirements of efficiency that a district can avail itself of them. Poor districts, as those in the unorganized territory would ordinarily be, can not meet the requirements and profit by the subventions.

Even the few facts stated suggest that this large extent of territory, denuded of its natural resources, overgrown with underbrush expensive to clear away, often needing extensive drainage operations, and settled by widely sepa

rated groups, offers little valuation for the local support of schools. A special method of administration and support had to be found. Legislation provided a remedy. Through this legislation the "unorganized" territory was organized into a "county district" and a new and equitable system of support provided.