I consider fashion is a beneficial thing when you look at it the right way.  By fashion all kinds of new things are started throughout the country, and you discover certain people who have a special aptitude.  It becomes the fashion to do various things, and in many cases people become interested and develop their own special tastes and faculties.

I am tremendously interested just now in rural education.  We want a rural school that will be attractive.  We are interested in getting houses for the teachers to be built right alongside the school house.  Then there will be the garden in connection with the house, the flower garden and the tree planting.  Some of us are looking forward to the time when the rural school will be the most charming spot in all the countryside, not a place from which the teacher escapes at the earliest possible moment on Friday to return reluctantly on Monday morning, but a place where she wants to remain, where the rural school will be the center of the community and community life.  It will be an attractive place for the best kind of teacher.  When we can get to that point we shall be able to establish in the rural regions an institution that will be a vital part of the whole community and a thing of joy and of beauty.

That gospel might be extended to the tree planting on the farmstead.  You know what the state art society had been doing.  There is another dragnet.  You have seen the Minnesota Art Journal, which is dealing with the problems in tree planting of the farm, planting around the farm house; That in connection with the modern farm house that has been suggested, these things have a very important bearing upon problems in which both you and the university are interested.

And then we can look forward to the time when you will have your permanent home, if not on the farm grounds themselves at least near there, where we could co-operate and use the same building, so that while it would be yours you will feel that it is being utilized throughout the year in such a way that the expenditure of the money would be justified.

There is a fine vista ahead of us, a vista of the things to be, accomplished by means of this American combination of private initiative and enterprise and idealism and the support of the state for certain details of work which can be best accomplished in that way.

The Shelter Belt for Orchard and Home Grounds.

A DISCUSSION LED BY JOHN W. MAHER, NURSERYMAN, DEVILS LAKE, N. DAK.

Mr. Maher:  The subject this morning is to be on “Shelter-Belt for Orchard and Home Grounds.”  I am satisfied, provided the “Home Grounds” include the whole farm.

The entire farm needs shelter, particularly from the hot, drying winds and other destructive winds that uncover and cut down crops in springtime and carry away the fertile top soil; and the summer winds, hot winds, of course, that eat up the moisture; and those destructive winds that sometimes harvest our barley and other crops before they are cut.  We need protection from all these winds, and in this latitude these winds blow uniformly from the southwest.  So every farm should be protected from them by a substantial shelter-belt on the west and south sides, which can also be the farm wood-lot.