噐 tomb PEACH TREE HEADED LOW TO FACILITATE SPRAYING AND PICKING. It need not be explained here that "an abandoned farm" is not one on which any comer may squat and take possession. It is just exactly what the word connotates-abandoned by its owner and for sale at pretty nearly any price. Here are some typical answers that came to me, and on investigation proved TYPICAL FARM IN "DISUSED" AREA, CLINTON COUNTY, NEW YORK. New owners in this region have proved that scanty crops in the past were due, not to poor land, but to improper methods of cultivation. exactly as they had been represented: 400 acres upland meadow, 300 level as a floor, fenced in 40 acre fields, five acre orchard in perfect condition just coming on to bear, 125 acres heavy growth oak and chestnut, two fairly good barns, house gone to wreck from disuse, eighty miles from New York, six express trains a day, one mile and a half to station. $5,000. If that land had been in Colorado or the Kootenay, it would be called a mesa. The orchard part would be valued at $500 an acre, the clear fields at $150, the timber at not less than $40, in all $40,000. 160 acres, 60 acres timbered hilly, 100 acres clear level meadow, fine brick house, 800 apple trees, good, barns, brook, eight miles to train. The agent apologized for the exorbitant asking price of $3,000. This is in Vermont; and Vermont does not raise apples enough for home consumption. This land is located in a peculiarly good orchard belt Even eight miles from the railroad, in Washington, the cleared land would command $150 an acre, the timber $30, the apple orchard $500 an acre, in all not less than $20,000. 200 acres, twenty miles south of Albany, fine view of Hudson, modern house, barn burned, 60 acres timber, 10 acres apples, 100 level, fine tilth, one mile to railroad. $2,000. If this land were in the Canadian Northwest, twenty miles from Winnipeg or Calgary, it would command $40 an acre; if in South Dakota $50 or $75. Two years ago I hunted for a ranch in South Dakota. Forty miles from a railroad, semi-arid lands were commanding $17 and $14 an acre without any house, and judging from the parched appearance of things at least forty miles on the vertical from any water. From New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine came literally myriads of answers, the average 260 acre farm not more than three miles from the railroad with good house and barns seldom being listed higher than $4,500; and outside the three mile radius from the railway, were hundreds at $2.000 and $3.000 What is the matter? Kismet! Is it the will of God? We have such a habit of ascribing the results of our own blockheadedness to the will of God; but is it? "Tell you what it is," publicly declared an Eastern farmer not long ago, "those Western fellows have us beaten to a frazzle the way they co-operate. They have their own sellers. That wipes out the middleman. They have their own freight agent. That gets prompt attention from the railroads-best terms for shipping. Then, they hang together and pull together and boom and advertise for all they are worth. We tried that in our district; but in three months they had raked up all the old family quarrels, Aunt Sara's Uncle John's fourth nephew by marriage and all that, till they had busted Our association. These folks would rather lose a dollar than see another man make two. We'd rather be skinned alive by an outsider, than pull together and see each other prosper." And the very day I read that farmer's explanation, came a letter to me from the Fruit Growers' Association of Grand Valley, Colorado. On the letter head was the motto "All Together." Is that motto the key that unlocks the secret of the whole situation? Did you ever know of the people of an abandoned farm area getting together to advertise? Did you ever know of the people of an abandoned farm area forming a cooperative association to buy machinery for common use, such as an orchard sprayer or motor truck to carry produce to market? Did you ever know of an abandoned farm area appointing a head packer to prevent cheating in the apple barrelputting first grades on top and cider culls in the middle? At one of the last apple shows in Baltimore, New York apples were ruled out because of dishonesty in the packing, though on the authority of President Brown of the New York Central, three shipping points of New York State each ship more apples than Washington and Oregon and Colorado combined. Did you ever hear of an abandoned farm area using oil heaters in spring to prevent the frost killing of the early bloom; or of a whole Eastern city going out in wagon loads on a cold spring night to help keep the kerosene burners going and to fight the frost, as they do in Colorado and California? I was once deluded into helping to form a village improvement in a Down East hamlet. I don't know yet whether the experience is to be recorded as comic. opera or "bluggy" tragedy. It had elements of both It lasted three months. HERE IS AN ABANDONED FARM THAT ITS NEW CULTIVATOR MADE PAY FOR ITSELF IN TWO YEARS. I didn't! Having something else in life to do than chase over back-yard fences trying to stop the spites and age-old jealousies and family feuds and brood of lies of a century, I dropped it quicker than I ever dropped measles or whooping cough or any other form of spiritual growing pains to help people who don't want to be helped. They raised money, raised it royally, most generously, and had lights and sidewalks within those three months; but the dead scandal of Aunt Sara's Uncle John's fourth nephew by marriage was a simple rule of subtraction and multiplication-especially multiplication-compared to the binomial geometric progression of all-fired cussedness that flowed from that innocent village improvement. "They ain't goin' to run us!" "Them new-comers has jus' come in here and stirred up things and made all this trouble!" "We always have fit here, and I guess we always will fit, it's been fittin' and fittin' always here." "What's good enough for us all these years, I guess is good enough for anybody." So it is far too good; but that spit-cat policy of trying a claw on everything new that comes your way, has driven progress and prosperity just three thousand miles from the degenerate sections of New England; but as the Easterner said: "We'd rather be skinned alive by the outsider, than pull together and see each other prosper." when degeneracy cures itself. The third mortgage, like the curse to the third and fourth generation and other sick-untodeath maladies, works its own most excellent and undodgable cure; and that is the door of hope for Down East today. It recognizes its own condition. This "what's-good-enough-for-us" policy has somehow left its progress at the tail end of the long procession. While other communities have prospered, Down East has grown poorer and poorer. When a house that would have sold for $8,000 or $10,000 twenty years ago now fails to find a buyer at $1,000, or a farm drops in value from $150 an acre to $10, the owner feels as if he had butted his thick head against a fairly hard fact. That is the time he comes awake with a jounce to feel how big the bump is. It is the turning point, and a mighty good place to turn at. Says the New York Agricultural Society: "We have reached the turning point." Says the New York State Department of Agriculture: "We "We are flooded with inquiries from the West for land in the East." Don't smile, but these Down East values that I have given are one-third higher than they were eight years ago when I came from the West. I lived through that same period in the West when having reached the collapse of the first boom, the country gradually righted itself and came up on the great ground swell of the last ten years' pros Of course, it is only a matter of time perity. It is risky playing prophet; but it is not prophecy if you put your ear to the ground and hear the same ground swell coming East. "It cannot be denied," declared Dr. Schurman to the New York State Fruit Growers, "farm orchards in New England are melancholy testimony to decline. We have at our doors the great markets. Why is it we are stationary? Why is the West forging ahead? It is their optimism, their enterprise, their confidence; they expect to succeed and they use the means to succeed. us in methods." A NEW YORK FARM OF THE CATSKILL "ABANDONED" AREA. The West is ahead of Western methods-that is the slogan for the new day Down East! Two years ago, not a single orchard heater was used in the East to fight spring frosts. Today, in the Southeast alone at latest report 90,000 are in use; East and West, 3,000,000 are in use. Two years ago, you could drive through county after county of the apple growing sections of New England and never encounter a spraying outfit at work, unless some special pest happened to have got to work first. Today, they don't wait for the curse to come. They avert it. They spray before bloom and they spray after bloom and they spray all through the summer-that is the few, who are beginning to adopt Western methods so spray. I am sorry to say you can still see hundreds of thousands of wild blighted distorted orchards where neither spraying nozzle nor pruning shears have ever come. The most successful orchard men are even beginning to nip out the inferior fruit soon H ONE OF THE UNOCCUPIED FARMS. Scientific cultivation reclaims such areas as this. after bloom to permit the best to come to perfection. You hear in Kootenay and Washington of apples coming to bear four years after planting. It is perfectly true. I have eaten apples in Kootenay orchards grown from the seed four years after planting. Formerly, it was thought trees must grow in the East for fifteen years before bearing; but by following the quick clean culture methods of the West fruit is being brought to bear in New York State four and five years from planting the whip tree. How? By cultivating and cultivating and yet cultivating again-not permitting a blade of grass or weed the size of a match to grow under the trees, but keeping the soil harrowed and rolled soft as flour. Any one who wants details of such orchards can get them from the Wadsworth Fruit Farms. Orchards are no longer being planted in the chill wet valleys as a sort of shaded hog run, but on the well drained uplands. Low headed trees are used to facilitate spraying and avoid bruising the fruit at picking time. Perhaps the greatest reform reluctantly adopted from the West and having to fight its way for adoption has been in the matter of packing. It is to the dishonest packer that the East chiefly. owes her maligned reputation as to fruit. A bushel box of Colorado or Washington apples sells in New York for from $3 to $5. A three bushel barrel of Down East apples on the very same market sells for the same or less. Why? |