Farmers are looking to the farm bureau for help in the cleaning and repairing of some sixty drainage ditches constructed in the past under the county-commissioner plan.  But the records on file in the county clerk’s office are in bad shape.  The farm bureau has taken it upon itself to arrange all this material so that it is available on a minute’s notice, and as a result has drawn up petitions to the supervisors for the cleaning out of three of these ditches.

Cooperating with the New York State Food Commission, the farm bureau had a power-tractor ditcher placed in the county last summer.  Peet placed his assistant in full charge, and the machine never lost a single day as a result of lack of supervision.  It has dug over 4000 rods of ditch for tile on twenty-eight farms.

For four years Niagara County farmers had not made expenses in growing tomatoes for the canneries.  The farm bureau called a meeting of some fourteen growers and together they figured the cost of production.  The average cost for 1917 was found to be $85 an acre; the estimated cost for 1918 was $108 an acre.  The average crop was set at six tons to the acre.  A joint committee went out of the conference and laid these facts before the canners.  The result was that the growers got $20 a ton for their crops in 1918.

These are some outstanding features of the service rendered its farmers by the Niagara bureau.  Here are some of its “lesser” activities: 

Taking an agricultural census by school districts of each farm in the county and completing the job in one week.

Effecting an interchange of livestock and seed.

Distributing 1000 bushels of seed corn among 383 farmers, twenty-two tons of nitrate of soda at cost among sixty-two farmers, and securing and distributing six tons of sugar to fifty beekeepers for wintering bees.

Indorsing 200 applications for military furloughs.

Assisting in organizing Liberty Loan campaigns, especially the third.

Assisting in the delivery of twenty carloads of feed, fertilizer, farm machinery and barrels, which had been delayed.

Holding twelve demonstration meetings, attended by 602 farmers.

Conducting two tractor schools, attended by 125 farmers.

Arranging eight farmers’ institutes, attended by 900 farmers.

Organizing a Federal Farm Loan Association which has loaned $125,000 to nineteen farmers.

The bureau keeps its members posted on what is going on in the county and what the bureau is doing through the medium of a well-edited monthly “News” of eight pages.  The best feature of the handling of this publication is that it costs neither bureau nor members a cent.  The advertisements from local supply dealers pay for it, and two pages of ads in each issue settles the bill.

The bureau’s books show that last year it spent five dollars in serving each member.  The membership fee is only one dollar.  The difference comes from Federal, state and county appropriations.