STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. lOI • 



We can gather a body of facts like these and reason from them, 

 but the great danger is in making general rules from exceptions 

 or from the happenings of a single year. If we get a wonderful 

 crop one year, we often couple it with some particular practice, 

 or some particular thing we did in the orchard that year, and 

 make a rule out of it. I know of a group of growers in West- 

 ern New York who think that spraying during the time the 

 apple tree is in bloom is a very efficacious method of controlling 

 disease and securing large crops. One year during the bloom- 

 ing period an orchardist did spray because he was obliged to 

 spray then, — he couldn't get time to spray other than in the 

 blooming period ; and having an immense bloom, and the season 

 being favorable he got a large crop. Since then he has based 

 a rule upon that single year's experience. We know that it 

 will not work out in the majority of cases. So we should be 

 careful not to arrive at conclusions based upon a small or insuf- 

 ficent mass of facts or wild generalizations. 



The personal factor is perhaps as important in orcharding as 

 anything else. It is the man behind the orchard practices who 

 is responsible, and that man fails or succeeds largely in propor- 

 tion as he applies his knowledge, applies his judgment, and 

 applies it consistently and perseveringly to the problem in hand. 

 These figures which I have given you have been deduced from 

 three large fruit-growing counties comprising an aggregate area 

 in orchard of about 75,000 acres, and we regard them as fairly 

 reliable. We have examined over 125,000 acres of orcharding 

 land in Western New York, in addition to one county in Eastern 

 New York. We are working up the details of these later sur- 

 veyed counties at the present time. 



This completes the little story I have to tell you, drawn as 

 you will see from the book of experience of the growers them- 

 selves. I want to leave that one thought with you, that it is 

 largely a personal equation, it is the man himself. We have 

 conditions for fruit growing in every county in every state in 

 this eastern country, and whether we succeed or fail depends 

 upon ourselves. We know that there is no better body of 

 husbandmen, farmers, men who deal with the soil, than the 

 fruit growers. We know that they represent the foremost 

 advance in tilling the land. Fruit is the flower of commodities. 



