Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1910-08-24

wise English farmer, Arthur Young,
wrote of the efforts to improve French
wool: A cultivator at the head of a.
sheep farm of 5000 or 1900 acres would
i'll a few years do more for their woods
than all the acadomicans and philoso-
piers will effect in ten centuries 1t is
absurd to think that any man who has
studied the subject only theoretically is
fit to direct those who practically work
at the matter. But friends, | wish to
insist to you hereto you practical men,
who own and work your farms-that it
is a perncious absurdity for the practi
cal man to refuse to benefit by the work
of the student. The English farmer
have quoted, Young, was a practical far
mer. but he was also a scientific farmer.
One reason why the great business men
the great industrial leaders-have
gone ahead, while the farmer has
tended to sag behind the others, is that
they are far more willing, and indeed
eager. to profit by expert and technical
knowledge-the knowledge that can only
come as a result of the highest education.
From railways to factories no great in
dustrial concern can nowadays be carried
on save by the aid Of a swarm of men
who have received a high technical edu-
cation in chemistry in engineering, in
electricity, in one or more of scores of
special subjects The big business man.
the big railway man, does not ask col
lege-trained experts to tell him how to
run his business; hut he does ask num-
bers of them each to give him expert ad-
vice and aid on some one point indispen-
sible to his business. He finds this man
usually Is some graduate of a technical
school or college in which he has been
trained for his life work.
EDUCATION TOWARD THE FARM.
''In lust the same way the farmers
should benefit by the advice of the tech
meal men who have been trained in
phases of the very work the farmer does.
| am not now speaking of the man who
has had an ordinary general training,
whether in school or college. While
there should undoubtedly be such a
training as a foundation the extent diff
ering according to the kind Of work each
boy intends to do as a NAM, it is never
theless true that our educational sys-
TEN should more and more be turned in
the directiop of educating men towards
and not away from, the farm and the
shop. During the last half-century we
have begun to develop system of agri-
cultural education at once practical and
scientific and we must go on developing
it, But, after developing it, it must be
used.
THE rich man who spends a fortune
upon a fancy farm. with entire indiffer-
ence to cost, does not do much good to
farming; but, on the other hand. just as
little is done by the working farmer who
stolidly refuses to profit by the knowl-
edge of the day; who treats any effort
at improvement as absurd on it's face, re-
fuses to countenance what he regards
as newfangled ideas and contrivances
and ieers at all book farming
II wish could take representatives OF
this type of farmer down to Long Island,
where | live, to have them see what has
been done, not as philanthropy but as a
plain business proposition. by men con-
nected with the Long Island railroad,
who believe it pays to encourage the de-
velopment of farms along the line of
that railway. They have put practical
men in charge of experimental farms,
cultivating them intensively, and using
the best modern methods, not only in
raising crops, but in securing the best