If I were a minister, I think I should make a point of spending a day in each week in close, unconventional touch with the masses of the people. A vacation employed in visiting farmers, it seems to me, would often prepare one as thoroughly for his winter's work as a vacation spent in visiting the cities of Europe.
CHAPTER XIII On the Experimental Farm
The purpose most eagerly sought by the Agricultural Department of the Tuskegee Institute is to demonstrate to the farmers of Alabama, first of all, that with right methods their acres can be made to yield unfailing profit, and that they can win in the fight against the deadly mortgage system. In many of the Western and Northwestern States cheese-making has led the one-crop, wheat-growing farmers to independence. The South has felt that this industry was beyond its reach, and has set small store by the dairy business. At Tuskegee, not only has it been demonstrated that cows can be made to yield from 50 to 150 per cent. on the money invested, but also that every farmer can, at moderate cost, make his own cheese, with a good supply for the market. Not long ago, the graduate of the Institute who is directly in charge of the cheese and butter departments, sent to my home specimens of six kinds of cheese made at the school—Tuskegee Cream, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Neufchatel, Cottage, Club-house, and Cheddar. These were as fine grades of cheese as can be found in any other creamery.
To find out what corn, grasses, pease, millet, etc., are best suited to the Southern climate and soil is the work of several years of earnest labour. At present experiments are in progress with ten varieties of corn, with vetch, clovers, cassava, sugar beet, Cuban sugar cane, eight kinds of millet, the Persian and Arabian beans, and many other food and forage plants. Fifty-five acres of peach orchard are sowed in pease, besides three hundred acres of corn land utilised for this second or auxiliary crop. The vegetable garden covers fifty acres, and there is hardly a day when this garden fails to help pay the table expenses of the school.
Stock raising is carried on more extensively each year. To get the best hog, sheep, cow, and horse for this region of the country is the chief aim. We cannot quit cotton, but we must raise our stock and our meat. The hen and the bee are great wealth-producers, but not more than one in three hundred Macon County families raise bees, and few of them give any special care to poultry. Therefore the school trustees spend a large sum of money each year in teaching the practical lessons of these industries.
