[8] J. B. Ross—"Agrarian Changes in the Middle West."
[9] Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson at the United States Land and Irrigation Exposition, Chicago, Nov. 19, 1910.
[10] The Rural Life Problem in the United States, by Sir Horace Plunkett.
[11] Dean Chas. F. Curtiss, State College of Iowa.
IV
THE HUSBANDMAN
The scientific farmer is dependent upon the world economy. He is the local representative of agriculture, whose organization is national and even international. He raises cotton in Georgia, but he "makes milk" in Orange County, New York, because the market and the soil and the climate and other conditions require of him this crop.
He is dependent upon the college of agriculture for the methods by which he can survive as a farmer. Tradition, which dominated the agriculture of a former period, is a disappearing factor in husbandry of the soil. The changes in market conditions are such as to impoverish the farmer who learns only from the past. Tradition could teach the farmer how to raise the raw materials, under the old economy, in which the farmhouse and community were sufficient unto themselves. But in a time when the wool of the sheep in Australia goes halfway round the world in its passage from the back of a sheep to the back of a man, the sheep farmer becomes dependent upon the scientist. He cannot afford to raise sheep unless the scientific man assures him that in the production of wool his land has its highest utility. "The American farm land is passing into the hands of those who will use it to the highest advantage."[12]