Eastern Iowa Farmer Spring 2021

Bulletins offered good,
free advice from Uncle
Sam’s Department of Ag
By lowell carlson
EASTERN IOWA FARMER
Ihave a heavy cardboard box filled
to the top with virtually every bit
of information needed to run a
family farm in the last century.
Some of these pamphlets date back
to the post World War I era and following
the Great Depression of the 1930s.
They were free for the asking when
I started sending off for them through
the mail as a grade school student in
the fifties. For the cost of a post card or
first-class stamp your congressman or the
Secretary of Agriculture was happy to
mail up to 10 copies of titles on everything
from raising turkeys to branding
cattle to nut-tree propagation.
I even scored on some perennial grass
seed samples to try on a neighbor’s sandy
ground that didn’t even grow decent
weeds. It was a qualified success.
These U.S. Department of Agriculture
Farmers’ Bulletins distilled information
on how best to lay out a field
for moldboard plowing, how to repair
horse-drawn mowers, even instructions
on how to set the cutter and raker teeth
on a two-man crosscut saw. There was
practical advice on how to establish an
apple orchard and instructions on making
cheese at home.
No subject was too obscure, too
seemingly insignificant for this voluminous
series. In all, perhaps 2,000 titles
were published in almost a century of the
series.
Farmers’ Bulletins became the general
public’s main information transmission
resource for research coming out of the
USDA’s experiment stations and research
Schoenthaler, bartelt, kahler & reickS
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Steven J.
Kahler
Joshua J.
Reicks
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46 Eastern Iowa Farmer | Spring 2021 eifarmer.com