AGRICULTURAL OPERATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS BEFORE THE REVOLUTION A detailed account of all of Washington's agricultural experiments would require several hundred pages and would be tedious reading.

All that I shall attempt to do is to give some examples and point the way for any enthusiast to the mass of his agricultural papers in the Library of Congress and elsewhere.
At the outset it should be stated that he worked under extremely different conditions from those of to-day.

Any American farmer of the present who has a problem in his head can have it solved by writing to the nearest government experiment station, a good farm paper, an agricultural college, the department of agriculture, or in some favored districts by consulting the local county "agent." Washington had no such recourse.

There was not an agricultural college or agricultural paper in the whole country; the department of agriculture was not created until near the end of the next century; county "agents" were as unthought of as automobiles or electric lights; there was not a scientific farmer in America; even the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Agriculture was not founded until 1785.

In his later years our Farmer could and did write to such foreign specialists as Arthur Young and Sir John Sinclair, but they were Englishmen unfamiliar with American soils and climate and could rarely give a weighty answer propounded to them by an American.