FARM TOPICS.

Colonist, Volume LII, Issue 12720, 16 February 1910, Page 4

FARM TOPICS.

The Can—l Li. L^.oriimeut have decided to further increase the number of experimental farm stations in Central Canada, in order that the settlors pouring into these newly-opened districts may have from the outset the benefit of the work carried on at these institutions, aud thus bo enabled to become efficient producers with ah littie loss of time or of expense as possible. The experimental farm system of Canada has rendered services of incalculable value to Canadian agri•culture. Thero is no public expenditure — federal or provincial — which has been more directly reproductive in tho widest sense than the money annually devoted to that object. Agriculture requires a comprehensiveness and a high standard of production, while the original fertility of the land is retained unimpaired, great profits secured, and a high standard of intelligence and of citizenship is evolved. This result it is the ultimate function of the experimental farm and their correlated services to secure, and the Canadian farmer responds freely to their influence.

Notwithstanding the inferiority of. the soil and climate of Germany for potafo-growing> the industry there has been increasing by leaps aud bounds. This is due, not to the "fact that the- Germans are larger eaters of the potato than other nations, .but to the subsidiary industries which have been developed in connection with it. These industries include the making of potato-spirit, motor-spirit, starch, potato i flour, dextrose; glucose, and artificial sago. The potato crop, from first to last, gives employment in Germany to over 2,000,0UD persons. Although some of these by-products of the potato are consumed by the Germans themselves, they are also largely exported. England receives, it need hardly be said, more than her fair share of them. Dextrose, -which, is used by English brewers instead of barley, is obtained from Germany. Over and over again farmers in England have been urged to take up the question of the production of p^t-atc spirit. It has been found so profitable by our German competitors that they have erected over 6500 distilleries for this purpose. At the present time Germany produces one-fourth of the total potato crop of Europe and the United States of America. This is a great achievement. The interesting part of it to the English farmer is that it has only been brought about by the careful studjv oi n.s >-

methods of potato-growing,