Americus times-recorder. [volume] (Americus, Ga.) 1891-current, 1911-03-04
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\ WHAT AGRICULTURAL COL :
\ LEGES GIVE. =


Georgia has eleven district agricul-
tural colleges, with probably a thous-
and students in attendance This
means that every three or four years
four thousand boys go out of these dis
trict colleges and return to the farms
better equipped for their life's work
and in position to assist the counties
in which they reside by the disssemind-
ton of the practical and scientific in
formation and experience obtained n
these schools. Well stocked with in
formation and reasons they become
experts and able to lead others. As
the Jacksonville Times-Union says in
an excellent editorial on agricultural
college training:
This is The benefit of all technical
education-in agriculture as in other
pursuits. In Hopkins Story Of the Soil
a farm boy who has had an agricul-
tural training is made to say:
As said, did not go to the ag-
ricultural college to learn the
went to learn the science of agri-
culture; but, as matter of fact,
| found that the college professor
knew about as much of practical
agriculture as | did, and a great
deal Of science that I did not know.
The only way to know the value o.
training in an agricultural college is TO
consult those who have been graduated
from one Whether the facts and
principles he has learned at school
have improved the young farmers
practice cannot always be told in the
course Of a year or so, but in a decade,
say, he should be able to outstrip, in
success, the farmer who knows no
reason for what he does but blindly
follows tradition
Othere things being equal, he GER
tainly would. Knowing the principles
OF agriculture, he would be able TO
originate new ways, ways economical
of money and time, for performing
some operations; he would be deferred
by his knowledge from following
wrong methods. He would know eX-
actly what his crops needed in the way
Of fertilizers and save wasting money
in buying such as were not balanced,
when considered as giving to the soil
those elements that it might or might
not need TO produce the best results.
He would know when to pillow deeply
and when to give shallow cultivation.
He would know how to adapt his
methods to the eXigencies of the wealth
er and the demands of the climate and
the season. He would know many 9TH
er things that only the book farmer
may know and that are hidden from
him who can farm only as his father
did before him.
The college graduate would be able
to make as much from a farm of a few
acres as the farmer by tradition could
from one of several times its size, or
he would be able to conduct a large
farm with more success, making it pay
all that it was capable of returning, AZ
the same time increasing its fertility
from year to year If some absentee
owner was looking for a manager for
his farm or grove he would naturally
prefer one that had shown enterprise
and acquired an agricultural educa-
tion to support the experience he had
gained on the farm In many ways the
knowledge gained at the agricultural
college is capable Of being transmitted
into capital and the money expended
in gaining such an education is money
saved, not wasted.