STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 95 



if your venture is founded on the figures you have seen in some 

 of the mushroom magazines, or on the occasional phenomenal 

 crops that nearly every orchard bears, the chances are you will 

 find the times out of joint long before your plantings come into 

 bearing and will take to building aerial castles in some other 

 profession. You will learn through experiences dearly paid for 

 that many of the cocksure statements you have read or heard 

 are but the stuff dreams are made out of ; that figures often pass 

 through the transformation that Alice in Wonderland under- 

 went when she drank from the magic bottle and immediately 

 grew to gigantic proportion. Thousands of newly-fledged fruit- 

 growers, the country over, who are now drawing checks on the 

 bank of expectancy, will leave money rather than take it from 

 the field of horticulture. You and they might not thus have been 

 deluded had there been anywhere a substantial body of figures 

 from which could have been obtained a true conception of the 

 financial conditions of fruit-growing. 



We are well justified in saying that with mcreasing competi- 

 tion, manifold uncertainties in orchard conditions and unbusi- 

 nesslike administration, fruit-growing is becoming a more and 

 more risky business. In the hands of the careless and unin- 

 formed it is likely to prove as unstable as a house of cards. Of 

 all this you need to be reminded rather than informed ; for, 

 experience and the teachings of years have given the old hands 

 among you, at least, knowledge of the uncertainties in growing 

 fruit and now, everywhere we are hearing discussions of the 

 business side of the industry. Temporarily the "idea of making 

 two blades of grass grow where one grew before," with which 

 agriculture has been chiefly concerned in the immediate past, 

 is eclipsed by the conception, just beginning to be realized, that 

 agriculture is a rather highly developed enterprise requiring 

 for success careful business management. We are beginning to 

 realize, too, that in neither the art of production nor in the busi- 

 ness management are the difficulties transient troubles to be 

 solved once for all ; rather they are permanent problems made 

 more urgent daily by new complications and keener competition. 



Coming now to the subject of my paper, "The Outgo and 

 Income of a Ten-Acre Apple Orchard," I have to say that it is 

 presented with the hope that it may prove a helpful contribution 

 to those who want data on the cost of producing apples and on 



