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Potatoes dug from ten hills each of certified and common stock. The certified seed at left produced 13 pounds, consisting of 44 marketable and 15 unmarketable potatoes, while the common stock at right produced 51⁄2 pounds, consisting of 24 marketable and 14 unmarketable ones.

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THE COLLEGE AND POTATOES

A Movie of the Extension and Experiment Service at Work
BY HENRY BAILEY STEVENS

NSTEAD of potatoes this article might have dealt with chickens or dairy cattle or apples or home economics. In all of these linesand others the strands between the State College and New Hampshire's 20,000 farms are being woven more tightly; but there is not time to speak of everything, and potatoes alone may well, as the boys say, constitute a "mouthful." In fact, I am tempted not to make it an article at all but rather a moving-picture.

Suppose that you are seated in cinema darkness, and that you are looking not at THE GRANITE MONTHLY, but at the screen. First let there flicker for a moment the windows of an ivy-covered brick laboratory strangely shot through by the radiance of a setting sun. Behind the glass a tall black figure stands turning upside down the contents of a vial and closely scrutinizing them. This, the caption informs you, is the State Agricultural Experiment Station at Durham.

In an instant the scene shifts to a busy office. A young man at a desk talking hurriedly to a farmer in overalls. A stenographer calls the young man to the telephone. Energetically he speaks into it. This is a county agent's office in one of the ten county Farm Bureau centers of the state.

Then you see a lone weather-beaten farmhouse with a road winding to it, tall maples, a big barn and a cosy atmosphere that makes the pianist down front break spontaneously into "A Little Gray Home in the West" or its latest successor. And suddenly, as if connecting all three of these scenes, appears a row of smooth, wellshaped potatoes linked together to form a long chain. "Educated potatoes" the film calls them. You realize that in some mysterious way they are to bind together the laboratory, the county agent's office, and the farm.

It is the fall of the year 1918. Seated around a table are some of the members of the Experiment Station Council-F. W. Taylor, veteran agronomist, large-framed, with bull-dog jaws and a sense of humor; O. Butler, unbelievably tall and lank, a specialist in plant diseases, educated in France, with twinkling eyes under under steelrimmed spectacles; W. C. O'Kane, nationally known as an entomologist and writer, facile, with an alert manner, togged for a cross-country tramp; J. H. Gourley, clean-cut, bald-headed, keen-eyed, whose apple investigations have brought increasing fame.

Take a close-up of the man who is speaking, as he leans back in a swivelchair. Of medium build, clean-shaven, gentle-eyed, with a bald lane over

the top of his head, he is easily the most unassuming and yet perhaps the most quietly determined man in the room. This is J. C. Kendall, director of both the Experiment Station and the Extension Service. Twentyfive years ago John Kendall came to Durham to enter college as a student from a Harrisville farm with only a bicycle, eight dollars in his pocket and an undefined zeal for New Hampshire's farming in his heart. The years have taken away the bicycle and perhaps the eight dollars; but they have given a point to the zeal. THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN recently stated that more than any other man in the state he had had his finger on the pulse of New Hampshire's agriculture.

"Gentlemen," he says, "we have got to do something about our potato production. New England as a whole has been increasing its acreage. Maine has nearly doubled hers, but we have been slipping. We are close

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to the market with a bulky crop that cuts down through freight rates any advantage of the West. What is the matter? And what can the Experiment Station do about. it?

Discussion waxes slowly. It is not a matter of acreage, but of the amount produced per acre. If so, why is our average production so low on this basis? Finally the floor goes to Dr. Butler.

"It seems to me that the limiting factor here"-he is a scientist and

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EXTENSION WORK HAS SPREAD OVER NEW HAMPSHIRE

likes to use phrases like this "is disease control. Most of the potato stock in the state is suffering from the degeneration maladies - mosaic and leaf-roll. Scab and rhyzoctonia are prevalent. Our farmers do not even protect themselves from late blight. The most pressing need is an introduction of certified seed, and of a campaign for the use of Bordeaux mixture."

Now the discussion becomes keener. There are conflicting reports about certified seed; some of it pro

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SOME OF THE POTATOES RAISED BY CHARLES E. MARTIN OF
COLEBROOK-THE FIRST CARLOAD OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
GROWN CERTIFIED SEED EVER SOLD IN THE STATE.

duces big crops, some of it doesn't.
The source of it must be investigated.
There are problems to be solved in
connection with the use of Bordeaux
mixture. But the conference fades
away with instructions to Dr. Butler
to go ahead.

In his spare time Dr. Butler likes to spray snap-dragons, likes to cover them with large glass bell-jars and determine the action of the sun. This evening you see him walking around among the flowers, lifting a bell-jar here and there and examining the plant beneath. He is planning his campaign.

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Then, in the morning, begins a patient hunt. There is nothing spectacular about it, nothing but letters and lists and dictation. He sends out inquiries carefully, determined to find the best certified seed available.

After a few weeks he reports to Director Kendall.

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"There is a man Maine named Hamlin," he says, "I like the looks of the reports of his stock. But he doesn't answer my letters."

"Telegraph him," says the director. "Tell him we'll take all the potatoes he's got."

Down on a sleepy farm Mr. Hamlin is in no hurry to answer his correspondence. He sits. calmly with the assurance of a man who believes that the world will come to him. He has been perfecting his potato stock for years, and he is aware of the fact that there will be no trouble in disposing of it. Finally he writes laboriously his terms. They are accepted at once.

The next season trial plots of certified seed are in evidence on the College farm. Competing with them are plots of good native stock. On other plots are being conducted spraying experiments-one strength of Bordeaux mixture here, another strength there, with variations in the number of applications. Visitors come and wander around among the rows. In the fall, it seems evident that certain conclusions can be drawn; but the trained investigators of the Experiment Station have been disillusioned too often to draw hasty inferences. One season's work is not enough for decisions which will have a far-reaching effect. Furthermore, it must be clear that the results could be obtained under farm conditions.

And, so it happens that one day when he is free of class-work at the College and can leave other investi

gations dealing with apple scab, white-pine blister-rust and the increasing array of other plant diseases, Dr. Butler climbs into a machine at Exeter with County Agent Don Ward. Mr. Ward, like many other county agents, drives a Ford car as if he were playing auto polo. He does not intend to waste much time on the road; and it is fun to watch them as they dive into wooded stretches, and shoot up over hills and down into valleys. It is not many minutes before they are at the farm of Mr. James Monahan of East Kingston. There they make arrangements with Mr. Monahan, a stocky farmer and one of the best "co-operators" in the state. There may have been a time once when Mr. Monahan scoffed at college professors and the science that they taught; but if there was, it has passed. He listens attentively, respectfully to their plan, and takes them out to the field where he plans to plant several acres of potatoes.

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FRED A. PEASLEE OF MERRIMACK, N. H., AND SOME OF HIS CERTIFIED SEED POTATOES

"You think you already have some pretty good potatoes, don't you, Mr. Monahan?" says Mr. Ward, with a smile in his eye. "Well, we believe we can show you something."

"Yes?" He is not entirely convinced yet that this certified seed from Maine is necessarily better than his own. He too has been proud of his potatoes.

"We'll run them in alternate rows," says Dr. Butler, "first a row of noncertified, then a row of certified. And we'll treat them both, so far as spraying and cultivation go, absolutely alike."

"Agreed," says Mr. Monahan, "will you make good the difference if I win ?"

They drive off laughing. This is the first trip in connection with the project. Every detail of planting and spraying is carefully supervised. By midsummer, Mr. Monahan, as he looks over the rows and sees how the certified stock out-tops the neighboring rows, is convinced. By digging time in fall, there is a good deal of excitement. As the digging machine goes up and down the field, it turns up to the light, row after row of smooth, white tubers that will grade "fancy," neither too large nor too small. Both sets of rows are yielding high, but clearly the certified seed has proved its worth. Carefully each row is bagged and weighed with. scientific accuracy. At the last, standin by the scales, Dr. Butler reckons

up the total. The non-certified seed has yielded 302 bushels to the acre, which would ordinarily be considered a very good showing; but the certified has produced 416 bushels to the acre!

"Now you step on the scales," says Mr. Monahan to Dr. Butler with Hibernian humor, "I'll best you're ten pounds bigger than you were yesterday!"

A few weeks later the extension agents of the state are in Durham for the annual extension conference. Dairying, fruit, poultry, lime and legumes, farm management, boys' and girls' club work, clothing, food and health, home improvement, forestry, cooperative marketing-work along all of these lines is planned; but among other things, potatoes have their inning. In the office of County Agent Leader E. P. Robinson the agricultural agents sit around a long table. Young men they are, most of them, hardened to unending demonstrations and evening meetings and community baked-bean suppers. College trained, and usually farm-bred, they are the connecting link between. the scientific workers at the college and the United States Department of Agriculture on the one hand and New Hampshire's hard-headed farmers on the other.

Carefully, logically, Dr. Butler tells the results of his experiments. Sagaciously the extension agents map out their plan of campaign. Director Kendall, feeling that another move is being made on the checker-board, gives calm guidance; is as ready now for bold tactics as he was before for conservative ones. Every county is eager for demonstrations.

"We'll want 500 bushels in Sullivan County," says Wells of Claremont. "Merrimack County will want 1,000," adds Peaslee of Concord.

It is as if a leash of trained hunters were unloosed. These men are the salesmen of the new farm move

ment, hustlers, bent on putting the good thing "across." When they get back to their county offices in Lancaster, Woodsville, Keene, Milford, Laconia, Rochester, Conway, etc., they start a running fire of circular letters, press material, and messages to the Farm Bureau project leaders with whom they keep in constant touch. All told, orders for over 6000 bushels of certified seed are placed. Furthermore, agents do not ask the farmers to take their word for the value of certified seed. On sixty-five farms, well scattered up and down the state, they start demonstrations comparing the improved stock with common potatoes. Every one of these demonstrations acts as a center of influence, reaching out to tell the farmers of its locality in the unmistakeable language of experience what certified seed can really do.

Not only do the agricultural agents spread the idea among adult farmers, but the junior extension agents take it to the boys' and girls' clubs. Over in Merrimack the neighbors come and look with amazement at what young Fred Peaslee's potatoes are doing Fred, together with his four sisters, has been enrolled in club projects for several years. He, too, had felt that he knew something about potatoes. To be sure, he had not been familiar with mosaic, leafroll and some of those strange potato diseases; but he had been willing to bet that his own potatoes would stand up well against this new-fangled certified seed. He is willing to grin now as he shows the neighbors his patch with the certified-seed rows standing out like young pine in a meadow. When he digs them in the fall, they beat his old stock by more than two to one.

All over the state in the fall similar success is reported. Returns from forty-nine demonstrations show an average increase of seventy-one bushels per acre from the use of the "educated" seed. If the whole 6000

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