368 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



MODERN METHODS OF FRUIT CULTURE AND MARKETING. 



BY HON. J. H. HALE, CONNECTICUT. 



I am here this morning to talli to you on. the subject announced bj' the 

 President. I was here last night in place of Mr. Barnes, but great is the 

 newspaper and newspaper reporting, for I see that your city papers state 

 that Mr. Barnes, of Kansas, made a splendid address before the Society. 

 However, having done some ueAvspaper work myself I liuow something 

 of how these things are done, so we will forgive them this time. 



The subject of the morning, "Apple Culture and Marketing," is of 

 gi'eat importance from a financial standpoint, not only to the members of 

 this Society but to the State of Indiana, and to every State in this Union 

 where apples may be grown, because, say what we -will of other fruit 

 crops, the apple is king of them all, it is the one fruit that has a place 

 and a market and a demand 365 days in the year. And not only has it a 

 place and a market in our own country, but abroad, because it is the one 

 fruit we may grow in any one section of the country and market in any 

 other section of our own country or in any other section of the world. 

 If that is not literally ti'ue at the present time it will be in the near 

 future. Thanks to refrigeration and modern methods of transportation. 



Now, I have been looking up the apple somewhat and the history of 

 its cultivation. Do you know that the first planting of fruit in America 

 done on the Atlantic coast was with the idea, not of getting something 

 for food, but getting something for drink? Apples and vines were planted 

 that the people who settled there might make out of them something to 

 drink. All of the original apple orchards of the east were planted mainly 

 for producing cider, and no well-regulated Puritan family thought it 

 could pull through the winter with less than fifty barrels of cider, and 

 some of them needed a hundred barrels, and then they came out dry in 

 the spring, both the barrels and the Puritans. With little or no culture 

 the ti'ees grew and gave fruit that was good enough for cider. Out of 

 this careless production of apples has developed the main body of the 

 apple orchards of America. It is only within twenty or twenty-five years 

 that people have begun to eat fruit in very large quantities. And with 

 the increasing quantity that is eaten has grown up the demand for better 

 fruit, better looking fruit, better keeping fruit and fruit of better quality. 

 The demand for fine fruit has become such that, at the present time, the 

 old time apple orchard, the old time way of handling and marketing its 

 product, are back numbers, and the man who attempts to market his 

 apples along the lines that our fathers did, might as well give up the 

 ghost now as any other time, because sooner or later he must go down 

 under the march of progress that demands sound apples and more beauti- 

 ful apples and apples put on the market in a better shape. 



