The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1903-09-01

classes.
Take, for example, the first study mentioned
by Doctor Brooks-arithmetic Pick up any high
grade arithmetic in use in the rural schools and
you will find no lack of attention to banking and
commissions and foreign exchange and CONNER
cial affairs generally. But agriculture rises to no
such dignity-not even in schools that will fur
nish five times as many recruits for the farm as
for the city. Moreover, you will find special de-
partments for common mechanical trades-plas-
tering, stone-work, carpentering, and even gaug-
ing and lumber-measuring-subjects quite as dit
fcult to teach or to understand as the rules for
compounding feeding rations or mixing fertlllz-
ers. But in no school arithmetic have l ever
found one reference to either of these important
forms of agricultural mathematics. You would
never learn from these textbooks that farming
calls for anything more than the dull drudgery
that blighted and brutalized Millet's "Man With
the Hoe" Shall we marvel, then, that the boy
who expects to farm finds little to encourage reg
ular attendance on such schools, and his tax
paying father little to encourage more liberal
support?
True, the arithmetics give some examples based
on farming, but there are comparatively few of
these, and there are practically none that illus
trate the possibilities of applied science as a
proft-making factor in agricultural work. Your
class of bright farmer boys, for example, may
have learned all the mathematical formulas relat-
ing to stocks, insurance and banking, but it is not
at all improbable that nine-tenths of them have
never seen arithmetic applied to agriculture in
such practical problems as the following:
Calculate the value of a ton of fertilizer con-
tanning 2 per cent nitrogen, 8 per cent phosphoric
acid, and 2 per cent potash; nitrogen being worth
Il cents a pound, phosphoric acid 4 cents, and
potash 5 cents.
Two dairy COWS produce each 5000 pounds of
milk a year. The butter-fat tests of No. 1 is as
per cent, and of No. 2, 63 per cent. Butter sell
ing for 25 cents a pound, how much greater is
the yearly income from No. 2 than from No. II
(Note.-One pound of butter-fat is equivalent to
1 1-16 pounds butter.)
Calculate the n~utritive ratio in a feeding ra-
ton supplying 3 pounds protein, 1 pound fat and
II pounds carbohydrates.
The analyses of cottonseed meal, muriate OF
potash and ~phosphoric acid being given, in what
proportion shall we mix, using the necessary filler
to get a fertilizer with 9 per cent phosphoric acid
3 per cent nitrogen and 3 per cent potash?
There is nothing impractical or extreme in
such problems as these; they might we'll be giver
in any arithmetic in use in rural schools. To the
larger number of pupils they would be of i'm.
mensely greater practical value than examples
based on commercial affairs, while as intellectual
gymnatics the agricultural problems would be al
good. Of course, the farm boys arithmetic should
not be devoted exclusively to such matter. But
from the very first a large proportion of his sums
III addition and subtraction as well as in the
more advanced branches-should deal, not with
work foreign alike to his knowledge and his in.
terest, but with familiar and practical subjects
While l have given so much attention to arith.
metic, the reader will bear in mind that I have