180 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



duce butter and put it on the market for thirteen or fifteen 

 cents a pound, and make as large a percentage of profit as 

 is being made in other lines of work. 



We have been endeavoring in our State to encourage our 

 young men to go into some special line of work, that line to 

 be determined by their own taste. John Randolph said he 

 would go half a mile to kick a sheep. He would never have 

 made a success of the business of raising early lambs for the 

 market. And it is just so ' in orcharding. The man who 

 sets his trees and then leaves them for nature to do the work 

 will make a failure. I think one of the objects of our agri- 

 cultural schools should be to determine, if possible, what a 

 boy wants to do. When you find a boy working out prob- 

 lems, you may be sure he is not adapted to agriculture, but 

 has a love for mechanics ; let him follow his own bent. But 

 when we find a boy who has a love for agriculture, then let 

 us encourage it and stimulate it all that we may. 



We are learning something on this question of varieties. 

 A few years ago, if a man was going to buy a hundred 

 trees, he wanted about ninety-nine varieties. He wanted 

 two Baldwin trees, and the rest something else. I asked 

 an old orchardist the other day if he was going to 

 buy a hundred apple trees, what he would buy. "Well," 

 he said, "I would buy eighty Baldwins." "What would 

 be the other twenty?" Said he, "Baldwins." When a 

 man's soil and the climatic conditions are adapted to 

 the growing of Baldwins to perfection, Baldwins he 

 should grow ; and when a farm is adapted to growing the 

 Bellflower, Bellflowers should be the product. The men 

 who are making money in the State of Maine out of their 

 orchards are, as a rule, those who are growing single 

 varieties and growing them to perfection. We have a man 

 on the Kennebec River who is marketing from three 

 hundred and fifty to six hundred barrels of Bellflowers 

 annually. By caring for his trees, by putting his brains 

 into his business, he* is growing a good crop of apples every 

 year. We have another man who is growing about the 

 same number of barrels of russets ; and you gentlemen of 

 Massachusetts are paying from five to eight dollars a barrel 

 for those apples in May, and arc glad to get them. 



