“No; we’ve been too busy with the producing end of our business to study the commercial end of it. Think of the work we put in to raise the crops we do! Of the 1,956,000 people in the Prairie Provinces, 1,652,000 are classed as ‘rural,’ but they include all the old folk and women and children on the farms, and even villagers. Yet our handful of country folk managed to raise in one year a good 10,000,000 wagon loads of grain, not to speak of hay and potatoes, and the rest. If you put those wagons in procession, so close together you couldn’t cross the street between them, that string would be so long that Mother Earth could tie a girdle around her waist with it and have spare ends left long enough to trip over. “It’s a big manufacturing business, this agriculture of ours, making food out of earth and air and water and a little seed. In any other big manufacturing business, do you think the men who make the goods in the factory have to sell them over the counter—or buy the machinery, for that matter? The concern must have its buying experts, and its selling organization as a matter of course. “We have made some progress on the selling side, with grain and cattle and wool and fruit and butter and eggs; but it is only a beginning. It is too much to hope that every experiment will succeed at once. An infant can’t run till it has got some practice in walking, and it can never learn even to walk if it stops trying after a fall or two. “We need co-operation—not between food-raisers at the food-eaters’ expense, but co-operation in each class, leading to complete co-operation between both classes. If that is a dream, it is one that must come true when we all awake to the need of working together for the good of the whole community.” * * * * * Off again. Do you see what that boy is digging, down there? Sweet potatoes. They are called “semi-tropical.” As a fact, we have a semi-tropical climate; not for long at a time, but long enough for corn and tomatoes and tobacco, through a big stretch of the prairie—to say nothing of the coast. We have discovered that sunflower makes about as good fodder as corn, and grows a tremendous weight of crop. But the corn line, like the wheat line, is pushing farther and farther north. For this, and for a hundred other most practical benefits, we have to thank the quiet, ceaseless work of the experimental farms, started long ago by the Dominion Government—work now carried on by the Provincial Governments too, at their universities. We don’t all make the use of these that we might, we are so busy. Fortunately they come to us, if we don’t go to them, sending out “extension lectures,” and manning the “Better Farming Trains” which the railways lend. Every Western Province has its own full-fledged university, a centre of light and leading, besides its normal schools for training teachers. Just over yonder, at Saskatoon, is the University of Saskatchewan.