Studies in ornamentation, best methods of grafting, pruning, budding, hybridizing, and treating diseases of plants, trees, and animals are thoroughly investigated at its experimental stations.

Vegetable and flower seeds, grass seeds, plants, trees, bulbs, and grape-vines are distributed in the department through the Senators, members, and delegates of Congress. By this means the best varieties of the vegetable kingdom are carried throughout the United States. During the coming year the country will be more carefully districted, and only such seeds and plants as have been thoroughly acclimated will be sent to the several districts.

Members of Congress from cities exchange their quota of vegetable and crop seeds for flower seeds, thus leaving more of the former for members with a farming constituency.

The following statement shows the amounts of seeds, bulbs, plants, and trees, so far as the allotments have been made, for the fiscal year 1902–1903:

Each Senator, member, and delegate will receive—
Vegetable Seed 12,000 packages, 5 papers each.
Novelties Vegetable Seed 500 packages, 5 papers each.
Flower Seed 500 packages, 5 papers each.
Tobacco Seed 110 packages, 5 papers each, to districts growing tobacco.
Cotton Seed 70 packages, 1 peck each, to districts growing cotton.
Lawn Grass Seed 30 packages.
Forage Crop Seed Allotment not yet made.
Sorghum Seed Allotment not yet made.
Sugar Beet Seed Allotment not yet made.
Bulbs 10 boxes, 35 bulbs each; or 20 boxes, 17 bulbs each.
Grape-vines 8 packages, 5 vines each.
Strawberry Plants 10 packages, 15 plants each.
Trees 20 packages, 5 trees each.

For seed distributed alone the government appropriates $270,000. Think of the beneficence of that! The rarest and best seeds that money can buy will be planted in every State and Territory of this country. Experts are continually sent abroad to find new cereals, fruits trees, animals, and flowers.

The department has at least one correspondent in every county of the United States through whom the statistics on acreage, quality of crops, and success of experiments are reported at stated times.

All questions pertaining to farming are answered by this department. If a man desires to buy a farm in Kansas or Alaska, a portion of the country of which he knows little, the department will tell him of the climate, the crops likely to be remunerative, and the obstacles of soil or climate to overcome. A chemist will analyze the soil for him, tell him what it contains, and what it needs to produce certain crops. An entomologist will tell him the insects prevalent which may destroy his crops. The scientist will also tell him how to destroy the inserts, what birds to encourage and what to banish.

At Summerville, S. C., the government has a tea farm with a fully equipped factory, and the tea produced is claimed by experts to equal the best imported article. This year one thousand acres of rice land near Charleston, S. C., will be put in tea. The cost of producing American tea is about fifteen cents a pound; the yield is four hundred pounds to the acre, the wholesale selling price forty to fifty cents per pound, and the retail price seventy-five cents to one dollar per pound.

In the wheat-growing States the government is trying a fine variety of macaroni wheat, in order to compete successfully with the imported article, of which $8,000,000 worth enters this country annually.