Custer weekly chronicle. [volume] (Custer City, S.D.) 1890-1931, 1912-09-21
CUSTER CITY. SOUTH DAKOTA SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 81 1912
trees and over large areas such as occur.
red in the Black Hills is prevented.

L
university to those who cannot goto it."
Asked what was, in his opinion, the
most prolific way in which the principles
Of agriculture could be taught in the pub.
lie schools. the Secretary related, in re,
ply what the State of Texas had done
along this line. He stated that when
Texas passed q law that agriculture
should be taught in the public schools oi
that state, the superintendents were in
despair, and having come to the Secre-
tary of Agriculture with their trouble,
he sent them an expert from the depart
ment of agriculture In short, this ex-
pert taught the teachers the principles
of elementary agriculture, termination,
cultivation, methods of crop rotation,
etc., and Secretary Wilson said that the
greatest obstacle to the successful teach
ing of agriculture there, or elsewh here,
was not lack of proper apparatus, or
experiment places, but noticeable lack
of qualified teachers. Mentioning the
great interest being manifested at the
present in the South regarding the mat
ter of better farming, the Secretary stat
ed that Georgia and Alabama have ap-
propriated $2500 for each Congressional
district for the purpose of promoting
better farming methods. To show what
the result of this was he told of the corn
growing contests among the boys of the
South. One boy, whose father was too
poor to afford an extra horse for the boy
to use in tilling his acre of prize corn,
harnessed up two goats and titled his
acre very successfully with them. An
other boy who desired to enter corn
growing contest was told by his father
that the latter could not possibly afford
to allow the boy the use of an acre
of ground, but upon being prom
ised the use of an acre of stumpy ground
contiguous to the farm. the boy cleared
that and raised 85 bushels of corn on it
that summer, while his father raised but
Is bushels an acre on the old farm. The
secret lay in the fact that the boy had
planted and titled his acre of corn un-
der modern methods, while the father
adhered to the old ways. 1t is hardly
necessary to state that the next summer
that father considerably revised his corn
growing methods.
Secretary Wilson told very graphical
ly of the agricultural renaissance in the
New England states. As an evidence of
depletion of the soil and its baneful ef-
fects of farm life in general, he related
that once when he rode from Albany to
Troy, in New York state, hefound every
third house vacant. That was in the
days before the revival, or rather, the
creation of better or more scientific
farming methods. One New England
farmer who had never changed his kind
of seed potatoes, nor practiced rotation
of crops, had presented to him by the
department of agriculture another vari-
ETY. of seed potatoes, and that very sea-
son raised 225 bushels per acre where
for years before he had not raised more
than 20 to 25 bushels per acre.
Referring to the personnel of Congress
as regarding the interests of agriculture,
Secretary Wilson informed us that at
present there are only about two farmers
in Congress, but that the majority of the
Southern Congressman, while lawyers
by profession, are for the most part
plantation owners who live on their
plantations, and thus are directly inter
ested in the question of agriculture.
Secretary Wilson is pleasant old gen.
men to meet, and all his manner is
democratic (not politically but socially,
and enjoys mingling with the common
people. Like all other Hawkeyes, he
never fails to adulate old Iowa in some
appropriate manner, and he delights to
tell of the time he went to Congress
when six lawyers had already planned
the order in which they should rep
resent the district from which he was
elected.