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[The following anecdote is from A Life in Our Times: Memoirs by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1981. Galbraith was born on an Ontario farm on the shores of Lake Erie. He hated farming, but studied at the Ontario Agricultural College or OAC, which is now the University of Guelph. He emigrated to the United States and went on to have an eminent career as an economist, teaching at Harvard, Princeton, Berkley and the University of California. He wrote many books, became a public intellectual, and was ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration. He married an American and became an American citizen.]

The farmers [at OAC] were studying agriculture more or less without exception in order to escape it. Their highest ambition was for a job as a county agent—called agricultural representative in Ontario—which provided one with an automobile, an office at the county seat and a sublime deliverance from manual toil. One went around telling the practicing farmers how to do better, a thing in which, at the time, an astonishing number were not interested. In Canada, as across the United States, agricultural extension agents gathered to tell of the classic rebuff—the farmer who blithely told one of their number that he was already not farming half as well as he knew how.

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