I spent two whole days and half a night in these offices and not once save at night was there a let-up in this sort of thing.  It was business all the time; the business of service!  Niagara County farmers are using the bureau.

Nelson Peet, manager, is a spectacled human magneto.  His speech and his movements fairly crackle with energy; his enthusiasm is as communicable as a jump spark.  A young man in years, yet mature in the knowledge of men and the psychology of service, he never wastes a minute dilating upon the philosophy of farm management; but he has worked twenty hours a day to see that Niagara County farmers got all the labor they needed during rush seasons.

This man has been with the bureau three years.  When he came to it the bureau had a paid-up membership of 325.  In March this year, when I was in Niagara County, the membership stood at 2185, and was increasing daily.  It led by a good margin, I was told, the fifty-five New York county farm bureaus.  These, in 1918, had a total membership of 60,000.  More than half the farmers in Niagara County are members of the Niagara Bureau.

When Peet first took charge there were two broad courses open to him.  He might have planned a program of paternalistic propaganda in behalf of the farmers of the county.  Such a program calls for a tremendous amount of talking and writing about cooeperation and community interests, better economics and better social conditions, but too often results in the propagandist doing the “coing,” while the “operating” is left to somebody else.

The other course was to find out what the farms and farmers in the county needed most and then set to work with little ado to get those things.  Peet chose the latter course.  And in so doing he has staged one of the best demonstrations in rural America.  He has shown that a farm bureau can be made into a county service station and actually become the hub of the county’s agricultural activities.

With the aid of state-college men, one of Peet’s foremost lines of bureau work has been that of taking inventories of the farming business of Niagara County.  For four years these records have been taken on some 100 typical farms.  Group meetings are regularly held at the homes of the bureau’s community committeemen.  Here, with the records they have been keeping, the farmers assemble.  Here they work out their own labor incomes and compare notes with their neighbors.  The farm bureau helps the men make these business analyses—­it does not do the work for them.  Now the farmers ask for the blank forms and are themselves as enthusiastic over farm-management records as the men who specialize in such.

These figures serve the bureau as an index to the county’s progress.  More than once Peet has referred to them and discovered where leaks could be plugged.  For example, these records showed an average labor income of $182 a farm for the four years ending 1916.