FORTY-SECOND ANNUAL REPORT. 33 



stood and made to serve the important purposes of her most worshipped 

 admirer — The Modern American Farmer. 



DISCUSSION. 



Question — What effect, if any, would increasing the ' flow of Lake 

 Michigan through the Chicago Canal have on our fruit belt? 



Answer — Probably the same as any river flowing through Michigan. 



Question — Our lake level is higher this year than last season — Why? 



Answer — This is probably due to the fact that we have had more 

 rain than for several years in the past. 



A Member — In answer to the question previously asked in regard to 

 the effect of increasing the flow of Lake Michigan water from the 

 Chicago Canal would say that the most marked effect would be increas- 

 ing our shipping facilities and thus prove a decided benefit to the fruit 

 belts. 



A Member — It is your theory that spraying trees with water when 

 the temperature is 3 or 4 degrees below zero — say at midnight — will 

 prevent injury? 



Mr. Winters — If water will protect from frost as it does, why not? 

 If the trees were sprinkled in the winter when there was a very low de- 

 gree of temperature, say 10 to 25 below zero — the water would freeze 

 as soon as it touched the trees, then would not the ice become a protec- 

 tion to the buds from the frost? I do not pretend to say that this is 

 right. It is only a theory with me, but it seems to me that it is the 

 theory that would work out all right in practice. 



A Member — What would be the effect of fresh cultivation in an 

 orchard just previous to a frost? 



Answer — I know a gentleman in our locality that cultivated his vine- 

 yard going through on Saturday afternoon, that night they had a hard 

 frost and his vineyard was more hurt than those around him where 

 there was no cultivation. As to spraying I think it would be dangerous 

 to spray in the night. If we could spray the trees after the frost was 

 over — it must be done after the frost is through freezing — we could get 

 much better results. 



Prof. Taft — Spraying has been tried and has given results. You can 

 do your spraying just as the sun is goins: down or in the night. The 

 older members here will remember Dr. Kedzie — he used to bring this 

 up at the meeting — the prevention of frost by the use of the spray. He 

 advocated doing this with warm water. The water being warm gives 

 off heat and this keeps off the frost. It certainly has a marked effect. 

 While I will agree that the waters of Lake Michigan do much toward 

 holding back the frost; I think it has the effect of frost prevention be- 

 cause at the same time we have a frost the water of the lake is warmer 

 than the freezing point, and it contains a great deal of latent heat 

 and warms the air and thus lessens danger of frost. But we have an- 

 other thing that we can rely on even more than this in the planting 

 of our orchards, and that is, the matter of elevation. If our orchards 

 are planted where we have a slope we can there get air currents, and 

 air currents have much to do with lessening the danger of frosts. In 

 many states they use smudgers, but our frosts are so infrequent that 

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