48 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



surplus money we think we can put somewhere where it will pay 8 or 10 

 per cent; we think we have got a soft snap; and then think of the 80 per cent 

 thrown away in the handling of those apples! For greatest profit the apples 

 wants the most careful handling, careful picking, careful placing in the basket, 

 immediate going to the packing table, not to be dumped in a pile in the orchard 

 but to go to some packing table, where by hand they are carefully assorted 

 i^to proper grades and packed in whatever package they are going to market 

 in; if it is going immediately to market, then moved on by the best means 

 of transportation you have; if it is a winter product, not going to be sold 

 right away, put it immediately in cold storage. Never go to bed at night 

 with any apples out in the orchard that have been picked that day. Put 

 them in cold storage, if you are after the profits; if you are not, why dump 

 them in a pile and leave them there to sweat out, or leave them there a few 

 hours or days or weeks. Experiments I have made convince me no grower 

 of high grade fruit that he hopes to put on the market a little later on can 

 afford to have it out of cold storage an hour hardly after it is off the tree, 

 plant or vine, if he wants the highest results. 



Every horticultural community, and every agricultural community for 

 that matter, should have a cold storage. Most of your farms are not large 

 enough so you can have them individually; but you can get together. Every 

 other class of men but farmers have to pull together or go down. Farming 

 is such a glorious good business that you can live in spite of it. There is no 

 other business that would stand up under the terrible neglect that agriculture 

 has. That proves to me it is a great business. Get together on this cold 

 storage matter and have a cold storage warehouse, ^ that your fruit may 

 go to it every night when you have finished packing, and then you can lie 

 down and sleep with a clear conscience and good bank account, and if 3'ou 

 want to go fishing for a month you can go, because your apples are where you 

 can handle them properly later on. 



These are just a few general suggestions as to commercial apple culture. 

 I believe these things from the bottom of my heart. I have not felt them 

 in the past as strongly as I ought. The trouble is with the apple business, 

 we don't any of us get the fever early enough in life. You talk to the young 

 man here today of 20 or 21, and tell him of the possibilities of 10 or 25 or 

 50 acre apple orchard in Michigan, and the question he will ask pretty soon 

 will be, "Let me see, when may I look for cash returns?" And you tell him, 

 "Well, you will have to wait ten years it may be." Ten years! That is 

 a long ways off to a bo}^ of twenty-one, and he goes into something else. 

 He will get a clerkship in a store where he can get six or eight dollars a week 

 right away. At thirty- five or forty, ten years doesn't look so far away; 

 but it is a good ways off; until he gets past forty he doesn't realize what a 

 short time ten years is. And my observation of the apple situation all over 

 this country is, that the majority of apple orchards are planted by men over 

 fifty years of age; and the men with real pluck and courage going into the 

 apple orchard business are often past sixty, and some past seventy; and I know 

 one past eighty starting a big apple orchard. What is ten years to a man of 

 eighty? But the chance is for the boy, for the young man. And if you 

 will take some of your dad's apple land, or some of her dad's apple land, 

 and plant it with the kind of apples that will grow in Michigan, and give it 

 the care and attention you will have to give somebody else's business if you 

 sell out your time to them, there is a glorious chance for you right on many 

 a Michigan hill, many an American hill all over this great country. But 

 don't think that you are "going west to grow apples;" that those "Oregon 



