Farmers Reading Courses

Excerpt from Farmers' Reading Courses NO apology is needed for the extension movement; yet there are those who say that persons who will not make the effort to learn of their own volition should be left in ignorance. There are certainly two considerations which make it imperative that such persons shall be taught - the consideration of altruism, or regard for one's neighbors; the consideration or the desire that the State shall prosper. If prog ress is desirable, then the extension movement must abide. Every farmer should be awakened. I suppose that it will never be possible to discover which was the very first reading-course movement for farmers. One can not read far in the history of the agricultural colleges without finding germs of the idea - the desire that farmers be given more and better reading matter. This idea was expressed before any of the agricultural colleges came into being. It was thought, however, that the normal work of the college would spread sufficiently the reading habit. But so many farmers do not go to college and are not touched by it, and so much new knowledge has come into the farmer's horizon, that some special machinery is needed to carry something of the college influence to the farm. This machinery embraces itinerant lectures and experiment station bulletins and reading courses. As early as 1882 President James Mills, of the Agricultural College Of Ontario, outlined a reading course for farmers. The council of agriculture and arts for the province cooperated in the enterprise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.