164 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



more than it was today. That investment is growing better all 

 the time. It reaches a good age before it begins to go the other 

 way. That is an important factor in fruit growing. 



The labor problem is the greatest problem. For instance, 

 compare the dairy with fruit growing, and compare the feed 

 of the cow with the feed of the tree. Now feed for the cow is 

 expensive, but in fruit growing the fertilizer bill is the least of 

 any line of agriculture I know of. We can get all the nitrogen 

 we want from the clover plants we turn under. So from the 

 financial standpoint fruit growing offers excellent opportunities. 

 It offers a safety of investment. I know of no line, even of 

 agriculture, that offers more safety than that, and agriculture 

 offers the greatest safety of any line. In many lines of invest- 

 ment a little turn in the tide of affairs may take the value out 

 from under them. It is not so with the farm. Conditions may 

 be unfavorable, returns low for a series of years, but the invest- 

 ment stands. 



You have here excellent advantages for marketing fruit and 

 the more fruit you grow the better will those advantages be. I 

 have been impressed in the last weeks, travelling through the 

 State, with the great potato houses I have seen all along the rail- 

 road to handle this crop which you grow so extensively. The 

 fact that you grow potatoes in large quantities affords you far 

 better opportunities for marketing them than you could possibly 

 have if only here and there a man grew potatoes. If instead 

 of here and there a man growing apples, you had hundreds of 

 orchardists, you would have the same conditions for marketing 

 apples. The buyers would be here seeking them. You would 

 have train service and shipping facilities from all points. 



Then it seems to me that here in Maine you have some partic- 

 ular advantages for apple growing. You have the climate 

 which gives you the very best of color. In few localities in 

 the whole country could you go into an exhibit and see such high 

 colored fruit as you find here — perhaps in the Northwest and 

 Minnesota, but they are limited greatly in the varieties. Why, 

 you can get the highest quality, and then you can get apples out 

 of season as compared with a large part of the apple growing 

 region of the country. I was astonished, coming into the State 

 here since the first of November, to have given me a Porter 



