STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 73 



years of the barrel fruit and the lower price of the box fruit 

 means simply that the consumer is coming to realize that he 

 gets quality here. 



Now if I were pleading this case as a lawyer before a jury, 

 I should be perfectly willing to rest my claim on these two 

 points. If we can grow fruit of better qviality and can market 

 it at a good profit at prices which will only bring the western 

 man out whole, what more do you want, if you are going into 

 orcharding at all, to convince you that New England is the right 

 place? 



But there are certainly other advantages for the East. To 

 keep up the scheme of numbering, these are : 



(3) That land is cheaper with us, much cheaper. Good 

 land can be bought for $25 an acre, or even less. 



(4) It is easier to get labor. I cannot see how such isolated 

 fruit valleys as Wenatchee are going to escape trouble on the 

 labor problem. 



(5) We have a better market for our poorer grades. I 

 know we don't market them in the right way, and I know we 

 have too many of this grade; and I know that our western 

 friends, if I were to make that statement, would laugh at it, 

 and say we were welcome to that advantage. But when I think 

 of that big pile of beautiful apples which my friend Mike Horan 

 showed me, I can't help feeling that a good market for it, if it 

 were marketed in the right way, would be a valuable asset. 



(6) We have better markets for our perishable fruit like 

 berries and plums and peaches. Of course they do ship plums 

 and even strawberries to eastern markets, but they are certainly 

 handicapped more with these than with apples and pears. 



In closing this list of our advantages, I want to mention two 

 difficulties which it seems to me they face, and which cannot 

 help acting as a drawback to the industry there, and con- 

 sequently as a help to the eastern grower in the keener com- 

 petition to which we must look forward. In the first place, I 

 am sure that irrigation is going to bring increasing difficulties 

 in its train. I believe this is one reason for the milder, poorer 

 quality of the western apple. In the second place, their trees 

 are planted very close together, and will soon need thinning. 

 And beyond doubt many growers will not thin as soon as they 



