FORTY-FIRST ANNUAL REPORT. 57 



Mr. Traiie — I want to say a \N'ord on this disease question. T have 

 been o•l•o^ving• peaclus for quite a while, thirty five years, I have been 

 through these various stages of disease and T have always considered the 

 law lame. It is not a practical law for fruit growers. I believe that 

 we want a law to cut the trees down but that you shall burn them up 

 within five days is not practical. I have never seen any community 

 where the public sentiment cannot be made strong enough with us in 

 the peach business, so that the law could not be carried out to the letter. 

 If you want to eradicate the disease cut down the trees. I do not care 

 whether you burn the brush or work it up into wood — take your time 

 for that, cut the trees down, burn them as soon as possible — I am satis- 

 fied that the disease will be eradicated. I have seen it tested out many 

 time8. I have seen orchards where the commissioner found 500 trees 

 which he cut down on suspicion. Of course, this is a pretty hard thing 

 to do, but there Avas no disease in the orchard next year. That shows 

 that as soon as the trees are cut, that stops the spread of the disease. 

 We should have a practical law, we should have a law compelling the 

 trees to be cut down, and Allien it states that you must burn them im- 

 mediately it is practically an impossibility. He cannot hire hoboes 

 enough to do that. If he cannot live up to the law he might be a little 

 slack. 



It is almost dangerous to set an orchard less than a mile or two from 

 any infected orchard, and even then, the chances are against bringing 

 that orchard through and getting even a few crops of fruit from it. 

 If we had a practical law every county in the State of Michigan would 

 eradicate the yellows and the little peach. The commissioner cannot get 

 the men to do the work as the law contemplates, simply because it is not 

 practical. One man could cut down 200 trees a day, but to do the other 

 part is another proposition, certainly the commissioner cannot do it. 



Mr. Hutchins — You will be interested in our experience. In the year 

 of 1891, when I went on to that homestead, two years before that, there 

 had been a failure of the fruit crop. There must have been sixty to 

 seventy acres of peach orchard — most too much of a proposition for me. 

 The next year we went tlirouph and started to keep up with the disease 

 if possible. We had a man that understood the disease, and we both 

 started in every Monday morning to go through the younger trees up 

 to five or six years old, and put a mark on the affected ones and the 

 third man followed with a good team and pulled out the trees and piled 

 them together and I took an axe and cut down the larger ones. Wednes- 

 day noon we finished up and the next Monday morning we repeated the 

 operation and in four weeks by following this systematic plan — two days 

 a week, three men and a team, we were able to get things in pretty good 

 shape. Mr. Crane has a farm adjoining and for a good many years had 

 had the yellows and he coutinued to get jDeaches right aloug, so you can 

 judge whether our work was efPective. I do not know that Mr. Crane 

 ever complained about our not being energetic enough, but I think he has 

 said that that thorough work saved his orchard. 



Mr. Wilde — I would like to know what you consider is the earliest 

 symptoms of little peach? 



Mr. Hutchins — The thing that I usually go by is the appearance of 

 the foliage. The ordinary peach leaf is folded up, but these leaves on 



