Successful Initiatives 211

that agriculture was the key to the national revival of the Acadians. Moreover he deplored the fact that educational establishments did not give agriculture the place it deserved in the school curriculum”.

Acadian leaders often complained that farmers lacked scientific information. Most people believed that anybody could become a good farmer. Speaking to Island Acadians during the 1932 Convention, Father L. Guertin from Saint Joseph College in Memramcook, said: “The education in our schools does not encourage agriculture at all. To be a good farmer, you need an education. To carry out intelligent cultivation, the farmer has to work with his head more than his arms. A good farmer can never be too knowledgeable (TR)**”. The possibility of establishing an Acadian school of agriculture on the Island was even considered in 1907 in order to provide young people with “the training required to make good and useful farmers (TR)*”. Although this school was never created, a large number of agricultural organiza- tions were founded over the years. As we shall see, these organizations provided valuable support to farmers from an economic as well as an educational point of view.

AGRICULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS

Interest in agricultural societies had manifested itself by 1898 in the Acadian communities. It was during that year that an agricultural club was formed by the farmers in Abram’s Village’; their example was soon followed in Urbainville (1899), Tignish (1899) and St. Louis (1901)'°!. L' Impartial announced the formation of the Urbainville club in the following way:

The people in Urbainville have just founded an agricultural club whose pres- ident is Mr. Laurent A. Arsenault. There are now seventy members of the association including several of the most prominent farmers in the beautiful parish of Egmont Bay. Regular meetings are held every fifteen days at which the main issues concerning ways to improve cultivation are examined. (TR)'°

These clubs played both an educational and an economic role. The members co-operated in buying seed and selling their produce’. According to L’'Impartial, “by joining this club, farmers took away from foreign merchants and buyers the right to monopolize prices and only pay what they want when buying from farmers. It is farmers, not