What the South Raises.
Such is the machinery of southern agriculture; what does that machinery do? In the first place, it produces crops to the annual value of more than a billion and a third dollars, constituting 28.7 per cent. of the agricultural output of the country. Two staples, cotton and corn, embrace 6511⁄2 per cent, of all the crop values of the south, and only seven of her crops can be called in any sense leading, viz., in the order of their value, cotton, corn, fruits and vegetables, hay and forage, wheat, sugar-yielding canes and rice. These comprise 911⁄2 per cent. of all her crop values. Corn has come to occupy a greater acreage than any other crop, having 25,612,949 acres as against 23,518,433 for cotton, which leads us to hope that King Cotton's disastrous tyranny has been tempered to the milder sway of a limited monarch.
Agricultural Education.
The three cardinal needs of the southern farmer to-day are education, diversification and credit.
The fundamental failing of the education offered the southern farmer is that it is not adapted to the end in view. The curricula, past and present, of our schools hardly bear the evidence of being framed for a people whose prosperity depends so largely upon mastering the art and science of the tilling of the soil. The country schools should teach branches bearing upon agriculture, beginning with 'nature study' with the little tots, and extending to physics, chemistry and botany for the mature pupils. Not only should the boy learn of the lovely lea, over which the lowing herd so slowly winds, but he should have an even more intimate acquaintance with the composition of the soil and of the physiology of those cattle. The present system of educating country children fits them for the spheres they are to fill little further than by such unfolding of the intellect as necessarily results from any schooling, but rather presents the anomaly of rearing a great people to unfitness for its life work. The curriculum of rural schools should be such that farmers would feel that they could not afford to allow their children to miss its benefits.
Many southern agricultural colleges meet the need little better and fail signally to send men back to the farm. In this respect a number of schools in the northwest excel ours. The agricultural college of Michigan has sent a larger per cent, of its graduates into farming than professional schools and universities send of their graduates into the professions for which they were prepared. The only plan of agricultural education which has succeeded in any state in its object is to have the institution devoted exclusively to preparing the farmer for his peculiar life work, and at very low expense. 'Agricultural' colleges which give extensive courses in non-agricultural branches are
