THE SOCIAL SIDE OF THE FARM QUESTION
There is a proverb in Grange circles which expresses also the
fundamental aim of all agricultural education--"The farmer is of more
consequence than the farm and should be first improved." The first term
in all agricultural prosperity is the man behind the plow. Improved
agriculture is a matter of fertile brain rather than of fertile field.
Mind culture must precede soil culture.
But if the improved man is the first term in improved agriculture, if he
is the effective cause of rural progress, he is also the last term and
the choice product of genuine agricultural advancement. We may
paraphrase the sordid, "raise more corn to feed more hogs to buy more
land to raise more corn, etc.," into the divine, "train better farmers
to make better farming to grow better farmers, etc." We want trained men
that we may have an advancing agricultural art, that we may make every
agricultural acre render its maximum. The improved acre, however, must
yield not only corn but civilization, not only potatoes but culture,
not only wheat but effective manhood.
But we may carry the point a step farther. The individual farmer is the
starting-point and the end of agriculture, it is true. But the lone
farmer is an anomaly, either as a cause or as a product, as the lone man
is everywhere. As an effective cause we must have co-operating
individuals, and as an end we desire an improved community and a
higher-grade _class_ of farmers.
The farm question then is a social question. Valuable as are the
contributions of science to the problems of soil and plant and animal,
the ultimate contribution comes from the development of improved men. So
the real end is not merely to utilize each acre to its utmost, nor to
provide cheap food for the people who do not farm, nor yet to render
agriculture industrially strong. The gravest and most far-reaching
consideration is the social and patriotic one of endeavoring to develop
and maintain an agricultural class which represents the very best type
of American manhood and womanhood, to make the farm home the ideal home,
to bring agriculture to such a state that the business will always
attract the keen and the strong who at the same time care more for home
and children and state and freedom than for millions. In other words,
the maintenance of the typical American farmer--the man who is
essentially middle class, who is intelligent, who keeps a good standard
of living, educates his children, serves his country, owns his
medium-sized farm, and who at death leaves a modest estate--the
maintenance of the typical American farmer is the real agricultural
problem.
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_.