1 U'TY-FlltST ANNUAL UEl'OUT. 135 



Until the last three years the s''apo farmer has been sailing close. 

 He did not have much money to put into commercial fertilizers unless he 

 got money enough from outside sources and then he did not place it in the 

 grape business for it was not a paying proposition. With what experi- 

 ments I have carried on it takes two years to get results from commercial 

 fertilizers on grapes. A man who gambles verj' much or sails uncharted 

 seas sails pretty close to the shore so if anything occurs he could get out 

 all right. There has been other reasons for that. Our labor conditions, 

 our young men who were on the farms a few years ago have left us in the 

 lurch. The farmer is looking for quick returns and you cannot get 

 them in the grape proposition. With our fertilizers, nitrate of soda, 

 which has been used quite a little we could see results the first year; the 

 other fertilizers we could not. I think the fertilizer which has been used 

 the most is bone meal. We have had very good results from bone meal. 

 We throw broadcast two to five hundred pounds of bone meal to the acre 

 and put it by handfulls around the vines. I have used bone meal and 

 wood ashes mixed half and half. A number of years ago I used ferti- 

 lizer on the light places and they began to bear two years before the 

 vineyards where I did not use any fertilizer. In places I used bone meal 

 alone and ashes alone. I think the bone meal was the one that had the 

 best results. We have been shipping in a lot of stable manure but it was 

 very deficient in potash. We have got to use potash somewhere and 

 lime. We are using more lime than we did. I can't say that I received 

 any results from lime but I could raise a cover crop. It takes quite a 

 while for our fertilizers to act on grapes. Even our stable fertilizer we 

 use takes two years to get good results. We used the stable fertilizer 

 on 16 acres two years ago and we had a moderate crop the first year in 

 grapes but we got results in foliage. The next year the crop on that 

 16 acres doubled the last year's crop but it took two years to get the 

 lesults. I am inclined to believe that we have got to build our grape 

 vine the year before we build our crop. The one that uses commercial 

 fertilizers this year will not get results the same year. Our County 

 Agent has been carrying on experiments with lime rock and Acid phos- 

 phate. Up to that we haven't anything definite to back on. Mr. 

 Larkins is using nitrogen. Claims he gets results. They are coming 

 back to the Phosphate. It was used two years ago in a vineyard I was 

 watching. We did not get any results from that the first year and a 

 freeze came and our grapes fell to the ground. The second year was 

 better but we lost them on account of the frost. I know of a vineyard 

 that was started three years ago of two acres. The first year they only 

 received 500 pounds of grapes off of it. This has been carried on for 

 four years and they got six tons off of the same vineyard coming up evejy 

 year by the use of bone meal. 



Question: They did not use any cover crops? 



Mr. Buskirk: No cover crops were used. But they had a nice weed 

 cover crop that you do not get when you do not use bone meal. 



We could have been called a miner or a slave for we mined our soils 

 and drove the whole family to work to make things come out right at the 

 end of the season. We hardlj' dared keep books. Three years ago a 

 little Farmer's Club appointed a man to keep books on the grape busi- 

 ness. When the end of the year was up we called for the report. He 

 said, "I have not much of a report and if I had kept them six months 

 longer I would have went bankrupt." 



