chickens, making the place stand him $6,000. He then had ten good 

 grade cows, valued at forty dollars each, one hundred young laying hens, 

 ten turkey-hens and two gobblers, four horses, ten hogs. He increased 

 his alfalfa patch to eight acres and put thirteen acres into berries, fruits, 

 and vegetables. This took in the twenty-one acres of bottom land. On 

 the nineteen acres of hill-land he increased his orchard to five acres and 

 his vineyard to five acres. His house grounds, with the stable, corrals, and 

 poultry yards, covered three acres more, leaving six acres on the hill sur- 

 rounding the spring in timber, from which he got all his firewood. The 

 forty-acre place which ran one man into debt brought the new owner who 

 worked with his brains and hands over $3,000 a year, and it was not an 

 exceptional year either. 



INTENSIVE FARMING IN STANISLAUS 



COUNTY 



J. W. WIBBB 

 Secretary Stanlalaus Board of Trade 



THE writer has been asked to contribute an article on intensive farming 

 in this great and rapidly developing part of central California. But 

 land is as yet so plentiful and reasonable in price, and labor com- 

 mands such high wages, that intensive farming, as understood in 

 European countries, is not yet followed by American farmers, orchard- 

 ists, vineyardists, and gardeners in Stanislaus County. Object-lessons in 

 this line are obtained from the Chinese, Japanese, French, and Italian gar- 

 deners, who utilize every foot, not to say every inch, of good land, and with 

 successive crops. 



In the fertile, well-irrigated districts of Modesto and Turlock, in Stan- 

 islaus County, as in much of the great San Joaquin Valley, extensive farm- 

 ing is giving away to intensive cultivation. The old way was to plow hun- 

 dreds and thousands of acres in a tract with ten-mule teams, often with a 

 grain-seeder and harrow attached. The crop was harvested with a twenty- 

 horse combined harvester. But under the abundant irrigation the land is 

 being subdivided into tracts of from five to forty or eighty acres. This 

 naturally involves something like intensive farming or gardening. 



Some orchardists have planted pretty thickly between their rows of 

 trees such products as cantaloupes, watermelons, peas, beans, Irish and 

 sweet potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, and other garden truck. Whether 

 it is wise thus to tax the soil and moisture, however rich the land may be, 

 and however well it responds to the demand, is a matter of doubt with some 

 people. 



Mr. Egebert Stevens, near Modesto, comes pretty near being an intensive 

 farmer. An examination of the large number of trees and plants that he 

 raises to the acre proves this. In Piis garden he is following the method 

 common in Holland, his native country, of "trenching." He spades a good 

 deep trench, throwing the top soil by itself. This he puts back on the 

 top of a good layer of well-rotted barnyard manure, filling up with earth 

 from the lower stratum. This plan he follows over the whole garden area. 

 It is astonishing the quantity and quality he raises from land thus treated 

 and properly irrigated. Perhaps some of the berry patches approach as 

 nearly as anything intensive gardening. Hon. L. W. Fulkerth, Superior 

 Judge of Stanislaus County, publishes the following from his own observa- 

 tion: "One man from one fourth of an acre of berries, picked this year 125 

 crates which he sold at one dollar per crate. Others received even better 

 returns from berries. One firm had seven acres in strawberries, from which 

 it picked a ton a day for quite a period. It is said that these berries paid 



