THE SOCIAL SIDE OF THE FARM QUESTION
There is a proverb in Grange circles which expresses also the fundamental aim of all agricultural education—"The farmer is of more consequence than the farm and should be first improved." The first term in all agricultural prosperity is the man behind the plow. Improved agriculture is a matter of fertile brain rather than of fertile field. Mind culture must precede soil culture.
But if the improved man is the first term in improved agriculture, if he is the effective cause of rural progress, he is also the last term and the choice product of genuine agricultural advancement. We may paraphrase the sordid, "raise more corn to feed more hogs to buy more land to raise more corn, etc.," into the divine, "train better farmers to make better farming to grow better farmers, etc." We want trained men that we may have an advancing agricultural art, that we may make every agricultural acre render its maximum. The improved acre, however, must yield not only corn but civilization, not only potatoes but culture, not only wheat but effective manhood.
But we may carry the point a step farther. The individual farmer is the starting-point and the end of agriculture, it is true. But the lone farmer is an anomaly, either as a cause or as a product, as the lone man is everywhere. As an effective cause we must have co-operating individuals, and as an end we desire an improved community and a higher-grade class of farmers.
The farm question then is a social question. Valuable as are the contributions of science to the problems of soil and plant and animal, the ultimate contribution comes from the development of improved men. So the real end is not merely to utilize each acre to its utmost, nor to provide cheap food for the people who do not farm, nor yet to render agriculture industrially strong. The gravest and most far-reaching consideration is the social and patriotic one of endeavoring to develop and maintain an agricultural class which represents the very best type of American manhood and womanhood, to make the farm home the ideal home, to bring agriculture to such a state that the business will always attract the keen and the strong who at the same time care more for home and children and state and freedom than for millions. In other words, the maintenance of the typical American farmer—the man who is essentially middle class, who is intelligent, who keeps a good standard of living, educates his children, serves his country, owns his medium-sized farm, and who at death leaves a modest estate—the maintenance of the typical American farmer is the real agricultural problem.
If this analysis is a correct one, it will vitally affect our plans for agricultural training. The student will be taught not only soil physics, but social psychology. He will learn not only the action of bacteria in milk fermentation, but the underlying causes of the social ferment among the farmers of the last thirty years. He will concern himself with the value of farmers' organizations as well as with the co-operating influences of high-bred corn and high-bred steers. The function and organization of the rural school will be as serious a problem to him as the building and management of the co-operative creamery. The country church and its career will interest him fully as much as does the latest successful device for tying milch cows in the stable. He will want to get at the kernel of the political questions that confront agriculture just as fully and thoroughly as he wishes to master the formulae for commercial fertilizers. No man will have acquired an adequate agricultural education who has not been trained in rural social science, and who does not recognize the bearing of this wide field of thought upon the business of farming as well as upon American destiny.
Research, too, will be touched with the social idea. The men who study conditions existing in rural communities which have to do with the real life of the people—the effects of their environment, the tendencies of their habits and customs—will need as thorough preparation for their work, and the result of their efforts will be as useful as that of the men who labor in field and laboratory.
But the most profound consequence of recognizing the social side of the farm question will be the new atmosphere created at the agricultural colleges. These institutions are fast gaining leadership in all the technical questions of agriculture—leadership gladly granted by progressive farmers whenever the institution is managed with intelligence and in the spirit of genuine sympathy with farming. But these colleges must minister to the whole farmer. They must help the farmer solve all his problems, whether these problems are scientific, or economic, or social, or political. And let it be said in all earnestness that in our rapidly shifting industrial order, the farmer's interest in the political, social, and economic problems of his calling is fully as great as it is in those purely scientific and technical. And rightly so. A prime steer is a triumph. But it will not of itself keep the farmer free. The 50-bushels-of-wheat acre is a grand business proposition provided the general industrial conditions favor the grower as well as the consumer. When our agricultural colleges enter into the fullest sympathy with all the rural problems, when the farm home and the rural school and the country church and the farmer's civic rights and duties and all the relations of his business to other industries—when these questions are "in the air" of our agricultural colleges, then and then alone will these colleges fulfil their true mission of being all things to all farmers.