So when the railroads, seeking to make traffic in a dull time and to rehabilitate their branches in the farming districts, made alliance with the agricultural schools, special trains were sent out into the farming districts, and these trains carried a competent corps of instructors from the schools. Day coaches made good school-rooms for the itinerant institutions; and a baggage-car, filled with specimens of fruit and grains grown under scientific methods, was generally attached. The Western roads had used similar trains with success in building up their virgin territories. The use of the scientific schools in connection was the Eastern adaptation of the idea.
A train of this sort will “make” half a dozen towns in the course of a day. The towns are not far apart, and the schedule generally permits a stop of about an hour in each. The coming of the “farmers’ special” has been thoroughly announced by handbills, posters, and the local newspapers. Whether the day be wet or fair, the appreciation of the enterprise that started the special out is sure to be manifest in a crowd that packs the day-coaches and not infrequently causes overflow meetings to be held from the rear platform of the train.
In the Far West the farm-train has long since come into its own
“Even in New York State the interest in these
itinerant agricultural schools is keen, indeed”
Interior of the dairy demonstration car of an agricultural train
There is no cause for disheartenment in the soul of the farmer after he has been down to the train. He learns the things that his land is capable of and yet has never reared for him. Take the perennial and hardy alfalfa, for instance. Crowd into the car, where a hundred earnest men from the country-side are gathered and listening to the man from the State Agricultural College, who talks on it.
“An acre of good alfalfa,” he is saying, “produces twice as much digestible nutriment as an acre of good clover. It is therefore profitable to our farmers to make every effort to establish alfalfa fields. Your climate is favorable to alfalfa, which can be grown on a variety of soils. The most favorable is a gravelly loam with a porous sub-soil. There must be drainage, fertility, lime, and inoculation. Alfalfa is a lime-loving plant, and if you haven’t a limy soil, apply lime at the rate of one to two thousand pounds per acre. These figures will be given you in a pamphlet as you leave the car.”