I says
all I is I owes to dat little puppy dog an' to dis heah conference."

At these conferences the most elementary subjects are discussed.
Booker Washington would tell and have told to these farmers matters
which one would naturally assume any farmers, however ignorant, must
already know. He never tried to deceive himself as to the woful
ignorance of the Negro masses, and still he was never discouraged, but
always said ignorance was not a hopeless handicap because it could be
overcome by education. While he frankly although sadly acknowledged
the lamentable ignorance of the rank and file of his race,
particularly those on the soil and dependent for education upon the
short-term, ill-equipped, and poorly taught rural Negro school, he as
stoutly denied and constantly disproved the assertion that these
ignorant masses were not capable of profiting by education. He
earnestly strove and signally succeeded in attracting to these great
annual agricultural conferences the most pathetically ignorant of the
Negro farmers as well as the leading scientific agriculturists of the
race. But he always insisted that the meetings be conducted for the
benefit of the ignorant and not in the interests of the learned.

He would, for instance, tell the attendants at the conferences what to
plant and when to plant it, and what live stock to keep and how to
keep it. He would have printed and distributed among them a "Farmer's
Calendar" which gave the months in which the various standard
vegetables should be planted and what crops should be used in
rotation. He constantly insisted that the Experiment Station at
Tuskegee Institute, supported by the State of Alabama, should not be
used for scientific experiments of interest only to experts, but
should deal with the fundamental problems with which the Negro farmers
of Alabama were daily confronted. The titles of some of the Experiment
Station Bulletins selected at random suggest the homely and practical
nature of the information disseminated. Half a dozen of them read as
follows: "Possibilities of the Sweet Potato in Macon County, Alabama,"
"How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human
Consumption," "How to Raise Pigs with Little Money," "When, What, and
How to Can and Preserve Fruits and Vegetables in the Home," "Some
Possibilities of the Cowpea in Macon County, Alabama," "A New and
Prolific Variety of Cotton." And all of these bulletins, so many of
which deal with the proble