226 IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



As for Bartlett pears, Harrison county has won first-class honors 

 again and again with its product. Down in Marion county, I am told, 

 one man a year ago produced 14,000 bushels of pears upon eighty acres 

 which he sold for something over $2.00 a bushel. It is estimated that his 

 profit on that eighty acres ran from one to two hundred dollars an acre, 

 "what can be done one year under favorable conditions can be done an- 

 other. Simons Brothers of Hamburg, Iowa, are commercial apple grow- 

 ers with forty acres in apples. Their receipts have run as high as $396 

 per acre, leaving a profit margin of $200, which is not bad for Iowa when 

 most of us think that Iowa land is not adapted to fruit growing. 



These stories of what men who have faith in Iowa soil are accom- 

 plishing at home might be multiplied without end. They may be told 

 of crops of other kinds as well as fruit. For instance, onions may be 

 grown profitably here even though popular opinion is that a man must 

 go to Texas or California to produce them. We associate the Bermuda on- 

 ion with parts of Texas and California, yet a man at Ottumwa named 

 Schwartz has discovered the secret of growing Bermudas in that vicinity 

 successfully and he has produced them as fine as they can be produced any- 

 where else. He does it with a new system of irrigation that he has de- 

 vised and he expects, when he gets his land in full swing, to produce from 

 600 to 1,000 bushels per acre. 



A farmer named Schutter in Scott county produced this past year 12,257 

 bushels of onions from thirteen acres, an average of 943 bushels per acre. 

 One acre produced 1,200 or 1,300 bushels. He received an average 

 price of 38 cents per bushel for them. A total of $4,657.00. He could not 

 tell just how much it cost him to produce these onions, but according to 

 government statistics on onion growing, it probably cost him from $150 

 to $200 an acre. Granting that it cost him the larger amount, his 

 thirteen acres produced him a profit above all expense of $2,027. Peo- 

 ple who are ambitious to go into intensive farming need not go to 

 Texas or California or the northwest when such opportunities lie right 

 here ready for them. 



These wonderful stories are not confined to agriculture alone. There 

 are opportunities in manufacturing just as good as in agriculture. Up 

 at Ames on the second floor of a building there may be found the larg- 

 est pennant factory in the United States. You know what the pennants 

 are, the banners used by high schools, colleges and clubs of all kinds. 

 In Ames, the factory that makes these is the largest of its kind in the 

 country and it has grown up there naturally. In the town of Nevada, a 

 man has built up a candy factory which manufactures after-dinner-mints 

 as a specialty and ships them by the ton lot to big dealers in New York 

 and Philadelphia. There is a demand for every pound of stuff that he 

 can produce and more, and it keeps him busy building up his establish- 

 ment to meet the demands upon it. These are mere illustrations. I have 

 not time to give any more. They are typical, however, and they make it 

 clear that there is no reason why Iowa should not manufacture scores 

 of things as successfully as it is manufacturing these pennants or these 

 after-dinner-mints. As the story has been told me, one of the geniuses 



