The Department of Agriculture has continued, with a good measure of success, its efforts to develop the processes, enlarge the results, and augment the profits of American husbandry.  It has collected and distributed practical information, introduced and tested new plants, checked the spread of contagious diseases of farm animals, resisted the advance of noxious insects and destructive fungous growths, and sought to secure to agricultural labor the highest reward of effort and the fullest immunity from loss.  Its records of the year show that the season of 1888 has been one of medium production.  A generous supply of the demands of consumption has been assured, and a surplus for exportation, moderate in certain products and bountiful in others, will prove a benefaction alike to buyer and grower.

Four years ago it was found that the great cattle industry of the country was endangered, and those engaged in it were alarmed at the rapid extension of the European lung plague of pleuro-pneumonia.  Serious outbreaks existed in Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky, and in Tennessee animals affected were held in quarantine.  Five counties in New York and from one to four counties in each of the States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland were almost equally affected.

With this great danger upon us and with the contagion already in the channels of commerce, with the enormous direct and indirect losses already being caused by it, and when only prompt and energetic action could be successful, there were in none of these States any laws authorizing this Department to eradicate the malady or giving the State officials power to cooperate with it for this purpose.  The Department even lacked both the requisite appropriation and authority.

By securing State cooperation in connection with authority from Congress the work of eradication has been pressed successfully, and this dreaded disease has been extirpated from the Western States and also from the Eastern States, with the exception of a few restricted areas, which are still under supervision.  The danger has thus been removed, and trade and commerce have been freed from the vexatious State restrictions which were deemed necessary for a time.

During the past four years the process of diffusion, as applied to the manufacture of sugar from sorghum and sugar cane, has been introduced into this country and fully perfected by the experiments carried on by the Department of Agriculture.  This process is now universally considered to be the most economical one, and it is through it that the sorghum-sugar industry has been established upon a firm basis and the road to its future success opened.  The adoption of this diffusion process is also extending in Louisiana and other sugar-producing parts of the country, and will doubtless soon be the only method employed for the extraction of sugar from the cane.

An exhaustive study has also within the same period been undertaken of the subject of food adulteration and the best analytical methods for detecting it.  A part of the results of this work has already been published by the Department, which, with the matter in course of preparation, will make the most complete treatise on that subject that has ever been published in any country.