Total, Chickens, Turkeys, Ducks, Geese, Guinea fowls, Pigeons, All others,* POULTRY The following table gives the numbers of the various kinds of poultry reported in 1910 and 1900, together with their value, and the number of farms reporting each kind in 1910: *Sixty-two farms report 158 peafowls, valued at $504; 6 farms report 221 pheasants, valued at $630; and 2 farms report 3 wild geese valued at $15. (1) Included with chickens. (2) Not reported. (4) Less than one-tenth of one per cent. The increase in the number of fowls on Pennsylvania farms during the last decade amounts to 15.2 per cent. while the value increased from $4,483,000 to $7,674,000, or 71.2 per cent. The number of farms reporting poultry decreased 2.2 per cent.; thus the average number of fowls per farm reporting increased from 53 to 62. The increase in the number of chickens, which are by far the most important class of fowls in the State, was sufficient to offset a decrease in the number of turkeys, ducks and geese. The value of poultry and number of farms reporting were obtained in 1900 for the total of all fowls only, and not for each kind, as in 1910. BEES The number of farms reporting bees decreased from 28,962 in 1900 to 22,297 in 1910, or 23 per cent. The number of colonies of bees decreased from 161,670 to 124,815, or 22.8 per cent., and their value decreased from $531,578 to $478,179, or 10 per cent. The average value of bees per farm reporting was $18.35 in 1900 and $21.45 in 1910. About ten farms in every one hundred report bees. GRAINS AND OTHER CROPS Potatoes were reported by 88 out of every 100 farms in 1909, hay and forage by 87, corn by 78, oats by 68, wheat by 53, buckwheat by 28, rye by 24 and tobacco by 5. Buckwheat and tobacco show larger percentages of farms reporting than in 1899, while for potatoes, hay and forage, corn, oats, wheat and rye the percentages are smaller than ten years ago. These 8 crops now occupy about 61 per cent. of the improved land of the State, hay and forage alone representing 24.4 per cent. Corn, wheat, rye, and hay with other forage crops show decreases from 1899 to 1909 in the per cent. of improved land occupied. During the past decade there was a decrease of 414,137 acres, or 8.7 per cent. in the acreage of all cereals, and of 181,336 acres, or 5.5 per cent. in that of all hay and other forage. Potatoes increased in acreage 34.146 acres, or 15 per cent. and tobacco 13, 982 acres, or 50.4 per cent. In the average value per acre, corn exceeds the other cereals, and wheat is a close second, while buckwheat and rye are less than onehalf, and oats approximately two-thirds as great as corn in that respect. The average value per acre of hay and other forage is about three-fourths that of corn, and less than one-third that of potatoes. Tobacco shows the highest average value per acre, being more than five times as great as wheat and over twice that of potatoes. The average value per acre of all cereals combined is $16.27, which is slightly above the average of hay and other forage, and less than that for either corn or wheat. The leading counties in the acreage of hay and other forage in the order of their importance are Bradford, Crawford, Lancaster, Susquehanna and Tioga. Bradford, Susquehanna and Tioga, together with Wayne county, forming a row of counties along the northern boundary, report nearly one-seventh of the total acreage for the State. The decrease in the acreage of corn is confined to no particular section; there are, however, three groups of counties in which increases are shown-first, 10 mountainous counties in the east central part of the State; second, Somerset and Bedford counties; and third, Armstrong, Butler and Clarion counties. The acreage of wheat shows heavy decreases throughout the counties of the State with the exception of a group of five counties in the southeastern section, which show slight increases. The seven counties of Franklin, Cumberland, Adams, York, Lancaster, Berks and Chester report more than one-third of the wheat acreage of the entire State. Decreases in the acreage of oats are shown in the northeastern and western portions of the State, the group in the southeastern section reporting, as a whole, the largest decreases. The increase in the acreage of buckwheat is due to its increased cultivation throughout the western three-fourths of the State, this increase being sufficient to offset the general decrease throughout the eastern quarter. The three counties of Bradford, Indiana and Tioga report more than one-fifth of the total acreage of this crop. There are three general groups of counties which show an increase in the acreage of rye. The smallest of these groups comprises Franklin and Adams counties on the extreme southern line; the second in importance is a group in the central part of the State consisting of Center, Union, and Mifflin counties; the third and largest is made up of eight western and southwestern boundary counties. The remainder of the State, aside from a few scattered counties, shows marked decreases, especially in the northern and west central portions. More than one-fifth of the potato acreage is reported from the five counties of Lehigh, Berks, Chester, Lancaster and York. Lancaster county alone harvests nearly 80 per cent. of the tobacco crop. For this reason this Department should have sufficient funds to send out qualified experts who can study soils, climatic, market and labor conditions, and by actual field demonstration show how to increase the productivity and the latent fertility of the soil and raise crops, for which there is a well paying market, with the labor available on the farm. To fill positions of this kind requires men who know soils and climatic conditions and who can make labor efficient, who understand markets and who can put the farmer into a position to do the same things. The census of 1910 shows clearly that the increased production of the acre in order to maintain her agricultural, manufacturing and mining prestige has become the watchword of the hour for Pennsylvania. DEMONSTRATION WORK This Department is the agency by which this demonstration work must be done because it is through the Department that the State Government keeps in touch with the agricultural interests, the most potent in the Commonwealth. The surrender of this educational work to any other agency would mean the alienation of the farming interests from the State Government, where all other public educational agencies are located and where this, one of the most essential, must certainly also be located. This is not an academic question, but a utilitarian one. Academics and utility up to this time have not mingled well, and for these and many more reasons I feel that the surrender of this work to an agency not directly under the control of the State, and upon which the State could not lay her restraining or encouraging hand whenever it may be deemed necessary would be as great a dilemma as to surrender her public educational work and hand it over to an agency not under her immediate control. Therefore, like the educational department, this Department should be equipped with funds to do this educational work in the most efficient manner, for before we can have education, before we can have scientific investigation, manufacturing, mining or transportation we must be fed, and the question of feeding the people of Pennsylvania is becoming more important every year and something must be done to improve this condition. An appropriation was asked for from the last Legislature by this Department for demonstration work along the lines indicated, but it failed during the last hours of the session. Requests come to us from many sources for information along all lines of agriculture, but for want of sufficient appropriation little help can be given. BETTER PRICES FOR FARM PRODUCTS NECESSARY It must be made interesting for the farmer to increase the products of his farm. As was said in a former report, if the farmer by keeping down production can realize as much out of ten dairy cows of equal capacity as he can out of twenty he is foolish for keeping and attending the twenty, but if by this demonstration work this Department can show the farmer that by keeping twenty of the better grade of cows already referred to, he will realize for the ten additional cows approximately as much per cow as he will for each of the ten cows, he will become interested, and it will not be many years until Pennsylvania will stand where she should stand to-day in the animal industry, especially the dairying branch of the industry. CO-OPERATION In previous reports I have referred to the co-operative movement, and I am glad to report that this movement has taken definite shape in a number of counties in the State, especially in Lancaster and York counties. The farmers are beginning to see that they are the victims of a commercial system that is so organized as to buy from them all they have to sell and sell to them all they must buy, and collect tribute for a service that never adds any value to their own products, or to the commodities they buy. They recognize still more than this, that the manufacturer organizes his own sales agencies and makes the consumer pay for this service whether he uses it or not. The farmer who drives to the factory and loads up a machine pays as much for it as the farmer who buys the same machine from an agent five hundred miles away; the one enjoys the advantages of the agency, the other does not but pays as much as if he did. Another thing the farmer has learned is, that no matter what make of machine he buys, whether, if a harvesting machine, it be the Deering, Champion, McCormick, Johnston, or any other make of binder, the price is the same because all are made by the same combination. But while these machines are made by the same combination, there are still Deering Agents, Champion Agents, McCormick Agents, Johnston Agents, etc., each one making a regular propaganda in the same territory for his machine, for all of which the farmer pays, but when the time comes for the farmer to do as the harvester manufacturer does, add the extra price that it costs to sell his products to the price of his wheat, oats and corn, when he puts them into market another agent of this merchandising system appears, who makes the prices, regardless of what the products cost and regardless of what he paid the agent for selling him the harvesting machine. The farmer is beginning to see that if it pays the manufacturer of harvesting machines to keep up a propaganda, such as I have de scribed, to sell his machines directly to the consumer it would also pay the farmer, the producer of the necessities of life, to sell his products by means of his own sales agency to the consumers and charge them only what the agency costs him. This would encourage the formation of consumers co-operative purchasing agencies and would facilitate selling directly to the consumers through these inexpensive agencies kept up by the producer. This is the healthiest indication along agricultural lines to-day, because it will take out of the hands of men who have shown themselves the most unscrupulous, the handling of the necessities of life, and will hand it over to those who produce and consume them, thus preventing the destruction, by unscrupulous dealers, of these necessities of life, to keep up prices as well as create a market for produce that now frequently perishes in the hands of the farmers because there is no local demand for it, because the farmer under present conditions is not connected with the consumer who would be glad to purchase his products. If therefore it is the duty of this Department to instruct the farmer how to increase the yield of the acre it is also its duty, after the larger crops have been produced, to get the producer in touch with the consumer, and for this work the Department is not, but should be equipped. SAVE OUR RESOURCES An enormous waste of both land, on account of gases thrown off by the coke ovens, and the nitrogen that passes into the air with these gases, occurs in the manufacture of coke. In the United States, in 1910, seventeen per cent. of the nitrogen contained in coking coal was recovered, while in Pennsylvania, the greatest coke manufacturing state in the Union, only two per cent. was saved. If all the coking coal mined annually in this State should be converted into smokeless fuel, or coke, and the nitrogen it contains were recovered by the use of possible appliances there would be nitrogen enough to furnish ten pounds of this most expensive element of fertility for every acre of improved farming land in Pennsylvania and all the rest of the North Atlantic States. If this were done the price of nitrogen would be cut in two and the expenses of the farmer vastly diminished. But not only is this valuable plant food thrown away, but the utter destruction of all plant life upon thousands of acres by sulphurous and other gases in the vicinity of these coke ovens follows. Surely our Agricultural Colleges should be able to devise and bring into use some process by which this nitrogen could be saved and the soil destruction ended. Another great waste of fertility is that of the sewage of our cities by which our streams are contaminated. The Federal and State Departments of Agriculture, the Experiment Stations and Agricul tural Colleges could do no greater service for the sanitation of the country and the maintenance of the fertility of the soil than by devising a process by which this sewage could be collected and the fertility it contains recovered and put into a condition to be easily applied to the soil. These institutions should be equipped by adequate appropriation for such work. A number of serious bacterial diseases, such as the crown gall, root rot, fire blight, peach yellows, canker in its various phases, and many other fungicidal diseases now infesting our apple, pear and peach orchards, should, in order to save these orchards from perennial destruction, be investigated so that their character and methods of propagation may be thoroughly understood and effective remedial agencies discovered for their cure. Work of this character should be done by the well trained scientists connected with our Agricultural Colleges, and when thoroughly understood by them, the remedies for these diseases should be made so simple that they can be applied by the average farmer and fruit grower. Our General Assembly should not hesitate to make competent appropriations for such work. THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE AND EXPERIMENT STATION Within the past eight years the number of students in our State Agricultural College has increased from a little over on hundred to over six hundred, and there are but few more facilities for the six hundred than there were for the one or two hundred. Such a congestion exists that pupils are obliged to stand for hours during recitations. This is a condition to be deplored and is entirely due |