Kansas Farmers Growing So Much They Need Help Harvesting, 1910

“A Kansas Idea” reprinted from the Nashville Tennessean in the Thursday, June 23, 1910, issue of the Watauga Democrat.

Poor farms are so scantily patronized in Kansas that counties have been at a loss to make proper use of the property….

The State Agricultural College saw its opportunity, and by act of the legislature was authorized to take over the unusual poor farms for county experiment stations, where farmers are shown in a thoroughly practical way the most modern agricultural methods.

Professors from the Agricultural College deliver lectures and give demonstrations at each of the stations once a month thro’ the growing season, and domestic science instructors give lectures for the women of the farming districts and afford an opportunity for the fuller discussion of all the problems of the farm home.

What a happy substitute for the miserable poor farm the experiment station is, with its broad acres of corn, wheat, and forage crops adapted to the cattle-feeding sections. Half of the country farms in Kansas are now used for the demonstration of model farming methods, and Governor Stubbs is hopeful that even a larger number may be turned into social and educational centers next year.

Many of the young men and women in rural Kansas have never seen a saloon. The sunflower State has never believed in filling its poor farms and asylums with alcoholic lunatics, paupers, and other derelicts whose downfall was traceable directly to liquor. It abolished the legalized saloon long ago, with the result that many of the new counties have never even found it necessary to establish a poor farm.

Kansas has recently issued a call for 20,000 harvest hands to help care for its wheat crop. There is work there for all who are able and willing to work, and the man who wants to prove the anti-saloon movement a failure had better not take Kansas as his text.