TEN YEARS' PROFITS FROM AN APPLE 



ORCHARD. 1 * 



U. P. HEDRICK 



INTRODUCTION. 



Most men grow fruit for the money to be made. In common 

 parlance they are practical business men. Yet in this day in which 

 efficiency is the slogan of business, not many fruit-growers have 

 precise knowledge of what their capital and labor are accomplish- 

 ing. As a class, it is not to be supposed that those who grow 

 fruit are more than others wilfully negligent of money matters, but, 

 lacking data with which to start and method with which to keep 

 track of the outgo and income of their orchards, and because of 

 special difficulties, life spins past with the business affairs of most 

 fruit-growers in a tangled skein which they hardly dare attempt to 

 unravel. 



COST OF PRODUCTION DATA NEEDED BY INVESTORS. 



Everywhere men from city and town are planting orchards — 

 beginners embarking upon what seems to be a pleasing hobby and 

 yet one capable of giving a living and an income for old age. But 

 if their ventures are founded on the figures seen in print or on the 

 occasional phenomenal crops that nearly every orchard bears, the 

 chances are they will find the times out of joint long before their 

 plantings come into bearing and will take to building aerial castles 

 in some other profession. They will learn through experience dearly 

 paid for that many of the cocksure statements read or heard are 



but the stuff dreams are made of . " Thousands of newly fledged fruit- 

 growers who are now drawing checks on the bank of expectancy, will 

 leave money in, rather than take it from, the field of horticulture. 

 They might not have been thus 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. 



ORCHARDING A BUSINESS. 



We are well justified in saying that with increasing competition, 

 manifold uncertainties in orchard conditions, and unbusinesslike 



1 Also presented, in essentials, before Western New York Horticultural 

 Society, Rochester, N. Y., January 28, 1914. 

 * Reprint of Bulletin No. 376, March. 



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