Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/54

 Another task for the publicity expert would be to attract the attention of the American farming public to the fact that there could be such a thing as tree-crop agriculture, and that some crops are now ready to use. This is just as much a task for a publicity expert as is a press campaign for a candidate for the senate or a corporation that wishes to raise fares. The sedate government bulletins already published are helpful, but experience shows that they do not fill a very big place. The task of spreading a new idea in agriculture is most difficult.

Suppose the man who started an institute of mountain agriculture lived in North Carolina and worked out a North Carolina agriculture; the interested farmer from Massachusctts discovers that few of the North Carolina varieties and practices fit his conditions. This shows at once that we need several institutes of agriculture in locations where their findings are adaptable for considerable areas. (See page 27 and Fig. 136.)

The objects of an institute of mountain agriculture might be classed as twofold—to create a new wealth through new crops and to save our soil resources from destruction by erosion. For the latter purpose we need to know what the danger really is. The thoughtful part of the American public might be shocked into doing something about it if they could be made to understand what soil erosion has done to China, Syria, Greece, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Ohio. A few well-planned and well-manned expeditions making an erosion survey of foreign lands and our own country would bring back material which might be one of the scientific sensations of the day. In the hands of good publicity experts it might make this reckless American people see that we are today destroying