ON AGRICULTURE TO CANADA 



167 



and cover crops later on. The markets are the cities of British 

 Columbia, the North-West Provinces, Britain, and Australia. But 

 fruit-farming is only one of the departments of the Company. It 

 has a colonisation branch. Small holdings have been sold to 

 English, Scotch, and Canadian settlers, at varying prices, depending 

 a good deal upon the demand for land. The price at the present 

 time is 200 dollars per acre, which, of course, gives the purchaser 

 a right to water, for which, however, he pays according to the 

 quantity used, which usually works out at about three dollars per 

 acre. The price of the land is payable, one-fifth in cash and the 

 balance by four annual payments, with interest at the rate of six 

 per cent, on the unpaid balances. Formerly, the holdings offered 



SPRING CULTIVATION, NEAR KENTVILLE 



for sale extended to twenty acres. More recently, they have been 

 reduced to ten acres. Further developments have taken place. 

 The Company has entered into cultivation agreements with pur- 

 chasers to plant out and cultivate their orchards for one or three 

 years as may be agreed on — a wise development when one considers 

 that Mr Ricardo, the manager of the Company, has lived through 

 the years of fruit development in the Okanagan Valley, and has 

 made the Coldstream ranch what it is. and also when one considers 

 that the fruit-growers who are settling in British Columbia are men 

 with considerable means, but in many cases with little or no know- 

 ledge of fruit culture. The Company undertakes to supply and plant 

 eightv-eight apple and prune trees (the cost of other trees is some- 

 what higher) and cultivate the ground for fifty dollars per acre the 

 first year, and twenty-five dollars per acre for each of the second 

 and third years. Nor do the operations of the Company end here. 



