College of agriculture

“ Now, why is the College of Agriculture at Cornell University interesting itself in this work? It is trying to help the farmer, and it begins with the most teachable point—the child. The district school cannot teach technical professional agriculture any more than it can teach law or engineering or any other profession or trade, but it can interest the child in nature and in rural problems, and thereby join his sympathies to the country at the same time that his mind is trained to efficient thinking. The child will teach the parent. The coming generation will see the result. ”

“ Paul. All are open to women, maintain excellent preparatory departments, and do well the work they undertake to do.
The notable development of the university College of Agriculture at St. Anthony Park cannot here have adequate room, but mention must be made of one of its auxiliaries, the so-called “School of Agriculture.” From the year 1868, when the agricultural college lands were merged with those of the university, the regents and faculty of the university had exerted themselves in all good faith to gather students into the agricultural college which they had promptly organized on paper. ”

“ All of our agricultural colleges, particularly those connected with Universities, are influencing a very large percentage of their students to pursue practical agricultural work. Of the 206 graduates of the Illinois College of Agriculture, 113 are actually on farms and 82 in some other form of agricultural work ”

“ To these farms themselves; here a stock farm; there a fruit farm; elsewhere a dairy farm. The shops in the colleges of mechanic arts have long since come to be true laboratories; they do not engage in railroading or manufacturing. They do not try to "pay their way;" if they do pay their way this fact is only an incidental or secondary consideration. A college of agriculture is a teaching institution: it must have equipment and laboratories. ”

“ Certainly it cannot be maintained that the New York State College of Agriculture educates away from the farm. Moreover, the tendency toward the farm is strongly increased. It is very doubtful whether any other type of professional or technical college could show a larger percentage of graduates and former students who are following the profession for which they prepared. ”

“ We are conducting demonstrations or test work on some 300 farms out of the 227,000 in the State. We are teaching one student for about every 500 farms. In this College of Agriculture, large as it has grown to be, we yet have less than one student to each rural township in the State. There are probably more farm boys and girls in any one agricultural county in the State than are now in this College of Agriculture. All this is in spite of the fact that the number of students is increasing so rapidly that we cannot properly keep up with the work. ”

“ Other Colleges of Agriculture are forging ahead, and if New York is to keep pace with the institutions in other states, and if it is to meet its own need for agricultural education, greatly increased facilities will have to be provided for the College of Agriculture, particularly in buildings for laboratory, class room, and experimental work. ”

“ There are four free agricultural schools besides the State College of Agriculture in Ithaca. Much assistance is given by the government to the agricultural needs of the State. Special courses are provided at many colleges for the various departments of agricultural work. Short courses are arranged for those who can only attend a few weeks, and at times in the year when farm work is slack.
Farmers’ Institutes are organized, at which experts discuss the best way of doing the varied work of the farm, especially how to increase production and to make the farm more profitable. ”

“ They are training young men for farm life. The farmers are responding to this new interest and are beginning to have great confidence in the colleges.
It is sometimes said that most farmers who get an agricultural education cannot be trained in the colleges. Doubtless this is true. Probably a very small proportion even of educated farmers can or will graduate from a full course in an agricultural college. Many will do so. There is no reason why a large proportion of the graduates of our college courses in agriculture may not go to the farm. ”

“ The state has adopted the policy of providing institutions where such education can be obtained, having established a college of agriculture and three special schools of agriculture, besides having begun the introduction of agricultural studies into the common schools and high schools. ”

“ On the other hand, the farm point of view must be kept constantly before the student, as the engineering point of view is kept before the student in a college of civil engineering; but we are coming to a new way of accomplishing this. Mere teaching of the sciences that underlie agricultural practice will not accomplish it; nor, on the other hand, will drill in mere farm practice accomplish it. It is not the purpose of an agricultural college to make men farmers, but to educate farmers. ”

“ At Cornell the coördinate departments of instruction in the College of Agriculture are classified as agricultural chemistry, economic entomology, soils, agronomy, horticulture, animal husbandry with its [51] sub-department of poultry husbandry, dairy industry, agricultural engineering and architecture, the farm home, rural economy and sociology, out-door art (including landscape gardening) , nature-study for teachers, besides miscellaneous courses—making altogether thirteen divisions. ”

“ There the "land-grant" colleges, whether separate colleges or whether organized as colleges of state universities, are securing magnificent buildings for agriculture, are offering fully equipped courses, and are enrolling as students some of the best men in college, whom they are educating not only for agricultural teachers and experimenters but also for practical farmers. Of course, there are many grave problems connected with this subject, many farmers who do not yet respond to the call for educated agriculturists, and some colleges that do not yet appreciate their opportunity. ”

“ A farm cannot be a "model" for all the kinds of farming of the commonwealth; and if it does not represent fairly completely the agriculture of the state, it misses its value as a pattern. At all events the pattern-farm idea is practically given up. It is then a question whether the farm shall be used merely to "illustrate,"—to display kinds of tools, examples of fences and [52] fields, breeds of stock. This conception of the college farm is comparable with the old idea of "experiments" in agricultural chemistry: the teacher performed the experiments for the students to see. ”

“ It is desirable that as many persons as possible shall assemble at the college itself, but those who cannot go to college still have the right to ask for help. This is particularly true in agriculture, in which the interests are widely separated and incapable of being combined and syndicated. Thereupon has arisen the great "extension" movement that, in one way or another, is now a part of the work of every agricultural college. Education was once exclusive ”

“ Feeling a great sympathy for the farmers of this State, and the difficulties with which they have to contend in their efforts to establish the business of agriculture upon a prosperous basis, and believing that there can be no permanent improvement in agriculture without a knowledge of those sciences which pertain particularly thereto, I have determined to devote the bulk of my property to the establishment of an agricultural college upon Fort Hill place. ”

“ Agricultural education has made great progress within the past few years. Methods are crystallizing and at the same time the field is enlarging. We once thought of agricultural education as wholly special or professional, but we now conceive of it as an integral part of general and fundamental educational policy. As a college or university subject it is necessarily technical and semi-professional; but college work must articulate with the common-school work, as language and science now articulate with the schools. ”

“ But the fact remains that the college connected with the university is to have the broader field in the future. Its very connection dignifies it and gives it parity. It draws on many resources that the separate college knows not of, unless, indeed, the separate college develops these resources for itself. The tendency, therefore, is for every ambitious separate college to develop the accessory resources, in the way of equipment in general science, literature, the arts; for agricultural education is constantly coming to be of a higher grade. ”

“ We know that this ultimate question in agriculture can not be expressed alone by the terms nitrogen, or balanced ration, or cost per bushel, but must be written also in terms of the human problem, the problem of the men and women of the farm. So we shall see the college consciously endeavoring to make of itself a center where these men and women of the farm shall find light and inspiration and guidance in all the aspects of their struggle for a better livelihood and a broader life. The college must avow its intention of becoming all things to all farmers. ”

“ We shall within ten years have a new generation of young men and women ready for college who have had their eyes opened as never before to the beauties of nature and to the fascination there is in the farmer's task of using nature for his own advantage.
But when we have increased the attendance at our agricultural colleges tenfold; when we have hundreds of agricultural schools teaching thousands of our youth the fundamentals of agriculture ”

“ The latest bulletin of the best agricultural institution is scarcely more instructive or helpful than a study of the “forty centuries of agriculture” included in the experience of these skilled and laborious people of the Orient.
The soil is a living thing, and must receive the treatment due to all organic and vital beings from which we expect service or tribute. The first requisite is that the individual man learn with what manner of soil he is dealing. There is now an agricultural college or experiment station within the reach of every farmer in the country. ”

“ The natural place to begin work in rural social science is the agricultural college. Future farmers and teachers of farmers are supposed to be there. The subjects embraced are as important in solving the farm problem as are biology, physics, or chemistry. No skilled farmer or leader of farmers should be without some reasonably correct notions of the principles that determine the position of agriculture in the industrial world. A brief study of the elements of political economy, of sociology, of civics, is not enough ”

“ It is believed that it is not too high an ideal to expect that at least one of the bulletins illustrating the investigations of the College should go into each home in the State interested in agriculture at least once a year, yet this ideal is nowhere near accomplishment, and the funds available for publication will not permit such a distribution. ”

“ A most suggestive phase of agricultural education is college extension work. University extension has had a rather meteoric career in this country, in so far as it has been connected with educational institutions; although the extension idea is spreading rapidly and is being worked out through home study and correspondence courses of all sorts. But I think there is scarcely any field in which the real college extension idea is today being more successfully applied than in agriculture. ”

“ When education is finally allowed to reach him in such a way as to be indispensable to him, it will at last have become truly democratic.
In this spirit agriculture is divided into its teachable units. The lists of divisions of the teaching force or curriculum in the larger agricultural colleges illustrate this admirably. In Illinois, for example, the title of professors and instructors are associated with such divisions as thremmatology, agronomy, pomology, olericulture, floriculture, soil physics, dairy husbandry, dairy manufacture, horses, beef cattle, swine husbandry, farm crops. ”

“ The organization of agricultural education under the state is very complete, and includes a state professor of agriculture for every province (as well as professors of horticulture in several cases) , “winter schools” of agriculture and horticulture, and a state agricultural college at Wageningen (1876) with courses in home and colonial agriculture. The total fees at this college, including board and lodging, are about £50 a year. ”

“ Whenever a boy displays a turn for agriculture, there is a fit subject for agricultural education, a proper student for an agricultural college, whether his father were merchant, farmer, policeman, or president. You cannot make a college so mean that farmers' sons will flock into it, but you can make it so great that the best of all classes shall press in. ”

“ Leaders are needed for every phase of this work,—for correspondence schools, for farmers' institutes, for movable schools of agriculture, for work on practice farms, and in many other of the activities which are being used in carrying the improved methods of modern agriculture to the farmer himself. The experiment station is an organized effort of science to improve agriculture, and the extension work of the agricultural college is the practical means of reaching the farmer with useful information. ”

“ Several colleges have agricultural departments, notably the Poona College of Science in the Bombay presidency; the Baroda College; the Maharajah's College and the Shimoga College, Mysore; the Central College, and the Sanskrit College of Bangalore. All of these are affiliated with the University of Bombay, and [Pg 229] present pupils for examination in agriculture for the degree of B. Sc. A.
In many of the English high schools of India are found agricultural classes which give both science teaching and field practice. ”