94 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



large and lucrative business for the people of the country in 

 the growing of some of the very best varieties of apples that 

 are wanted on the markets of the world today. Of course when 

 you get high quality of fruit it means high quality of men to 

 grow it ; it means great care ; it means thorough, systematic 

 work from the planting of the tree — the preparation of the 

 ground I might say — right up until the apple is placed without 

 flaw or blemish on the consumer's table, and we must work for 

 the extra reward that we want every time. I came here to 

 learn, and to see, and to meet you good people, not to talk to 

 you, but I might perhaps throw out, as the President has sug- 

 gested to me, a hint in regard to the value of co-operation 

 among fruit growers for the purpose not only of growing fruit 

 successfully, but more particularly of marketing it and getting 

 the full value for it. The province of Nova Scotia, as perhaps 

 some of you are aware, has for the last twenty-five years been 

 one of the prominent fruit growing sections of the Dominion 

 of Canada, but it is only within the last two years that the fruit 

 growers there have taken up this matter of co-operative market- 

 ing. And this year I am glad to be able to tell you that while 

 they have had a very much larger crop than they have ever had 

 before to handle, they are moving it off to dift"erent foreign 

 markets, to the Canadian Northwest, and getting more money 

 out of it than they ever have in the past, and largely through 

 their judicious system of co-operative handling and marketing. 

 Somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand barrels have 

 gone to an entirely new market for Nova Scotia, through the co- 

 operative societies, in the northwest provinces of Canada, this 

 year. Some eight tliousand barrels have already gone and 

 perhaps as many more are contracted for, to the German mar- 

 ket, a lot are going to Holland, and then of course the mam 

 body of the crop goes to Great Britain and is largely distributed 

 through London, to which market so many of your nice apples 

 go. I believe that no better work could engage the attention 

 of your Association here. It has done good work in the past 

 I know, and I must congratulate the officers of the Maine 

 State Pomological Society for the grand good results they are 

 getting from the work that they have been so patiently and per- 

 sistently doing in the past years. 1 have watched what has been 

 done here with a great deal of interest and am glad to see the 



