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.
CHAPTER XV
THE NEEDS OF NEW ENGLAND AGRICULTURE
One might name a score of important activities that should be encouraged in order to better New England agriculture. But the two fundamental needs are (1) adaptation and (2) co-operation.
By adaptation is meant such development of agriculture as shall more fully utilize existing physical and commercial conditions. The West has for seventy-five years pressed hard upon New England farming. But along with this western competition has come a new opportunity for the eastern farmer. New England farmers as a whole have not quickly enough responded to this new opportunity. Many of their troubles may be traced to the failure to adapt themselves to the new conditions. The men in New England who have met the new opportunity are succeeding.
What does this adaptation consist in? It means, first, the adaptation of the New England farmer to his markets. In most parts of the country the type of farming is perhaps more dependent upon physical conditions of soil and climate than upon the immediate market. In New England the reverse is now true, and the type of New England farming must be adapted, absolutely and completely, to the demands of its market. New England farmers have the most superb markets in the country. Of the six million people in New England, approximately 75 per cent. live in the cities and villages. There are, in New England, thirty cities having a population of twenty-five thousand or more. The great majority of these cities are manufacturing cities peopled by the best class of consumers in the world—the American skilled artisan. They constitute a nearby market that demands fresh products which cannot be transported across a continent. New England is also especially favored in its nearness to the European market. The New England farmer then must adapt his crops, his methods, and his style of farming to his peculiar market.