The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 233 



raise eight tons of grapes again on these acres of 

 vineyard, I must make the soil as I found it twenty 

 years ago. There are no more virgin soils east of 

 the Mississippi, and fewer each year west of it. 

 We are confronted by a problem of problems : How 

 to raise food of all kinds on a fixed acreage and for 

 an ever-increasing population? 



Everywhere in America, the effect of this 

 tremendous "pull" on the land by orchards 

 and vineyards is plain. The best fruit-farms, by 

 following intensive cultivation, hold to their old 

 records and even surpass them, but hundreds of 

 farms are rapidly losing their strength through 

 under-feeding and over-cropping. Unquestion- 

 ably the next generation, and generations to come, 

 will receive a larger acreage of such worn lands, 

 and it is their problem of problems to bring the 

 soil back to, or forward to, or up to, its highest 

 pitch of fertility. The old methods of fertili- 

 zation, even of cultivation, even those practiced 

 half a century ago are abandoned. Then many a 

 valley was a vast stock farm, and barnyard manure 

 could be had sufficient to keep the land fairly with 

 humus. But we cannot longer build humus into 

 the soil in this day. As the best fruit-growers 

 interpret conditions, there was not, even fifty years 

 ago, enough fertilizer used to keep the land in best 

 order to feed plants. We feed the land better 

 than did our predecessors. Consider one example. 

 There are upwards of ten thousand tons of grapes 

 raised each year in the Valley, and this enormous 



