Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/586

576. The employees are all thoroughbred experts, graduates of universities, colleges or technical schools. A more devoted set of men cannot be found in the whole country. Their influence is raising the standard of farming in almost every State. One of the great railway promoters in the Northwest long since realized the importance of this matter, and in order to promote the interests of his railroad he made arrangements with every town throughout the great State near the line to send two men every year to the capital, where the Agricultural College and Experiment Station were situated. He gave them a free pass, liberty to remain four days, the State giving them a banquet—the only condition being that one day out of the four should be devoted to the study of the work of the Agricultural Experiment Station; and for a number of years one thousand (1,000) to fifteeenfifteen [sic] hundred (1,500) men enjoyed this benefit every year.

Each Experiment Station devotes itself to the special conditions of the State in which it is placed. For instance, in Minnesota the whole standard of wheat cultivation and of dairy product has been raised to a very high point. In Michigan the market value of a large product of butter has been raised to a more profitable point by improvement in stock, in the establishment of creameries, and in other ways. The application of the bacterium of June butter in the creameries has become common.

Professor Kohn, who made this discovery at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, in 1893, has established a bacterium factory which, at the last advices known to me, supplied one hundred and fifty (150) creameries with the ferment.

In Kansas attention has been given to the improvement in the quality of maize or Indian corn. The ordinary maize is deficient in the nitrogen or protein elements as compared to the starch and fats. Varieties have been bred, bringing maize even with wheat in the protein element, which may end in making maize as complete a food as either wheat or oatmeal.

In the South the greatest attention is given to renovating plants of the leguminous type—beans, peas, alfalfa and others. The slave-stricken lands are being regenerated, and gradually but slowly stock suited to the climate and conditions of the Atlantic cotton States is being introduced.

Of course all these changes imply the use of fertilizers in larger and larger measure. That need is being met. The vast deposits of phosphatic material in Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida and the Carolinas, coupled with the use of the ground slag from basic steel furnaces, give an assurance of an abundant supply of that necessary element for all time to come.

The discovery of the function of the bacteria attached to the stalks