80 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1891. 



season, and in their estimate of the income they hope to derive 

 from their crop, they reason, perhaps, something like this : 

 One has one hundred apple trees or one thousand grapevines. 

 If the apple trees are twenty years old they should yield at 

 least three barrels per tree ; or the vines if five years old or 

 more should yield ten pounds per vine or 10,000 pounds, and 

 reckoning the prices at the average for a decade he gets upon 

 paper very satisfactory returns. 



But how many of us make our plans for the coming year with 

 any degree of certainty that the results will give us even a fair 

 return for labor and interest on the capital invested ? 



We know too well from bitter experience the chances the 

 crops must run with frosts, with storm and wind, with drouth 

 and wet, and above all with insects and the many blights, rusts, 

 mildews, rots and smuts, that feed upon and destroy the plants 

 we cultivate. 



We have the authority of the Entomological Bureau of the 

 Department of Agriculture at Washington for the statement, 

 that the loss to the farming interests, including all its branches 

 for the past year amounts to four hundred millions of dollars 

 ($400,000,000). This almost inconceivable amount of money 

 from the destruction to our crop in one year. Yet who that has 

 experienced the loss of his grape crop by mildew or rot, his apples 

 by the scab, his pears by the scab and blight, his plums by the 

 black wart and rotting of the fruit, his cherries and peaches by 

 rotting of the fruit, his strawberries by the leaf blight, his 

 potatoes by the potato rot and his oats and grasses by the rust, 

 his cabbage crop by the club root, his celery by the leaf blight, 

 his lettuce by the mildew, and his cuttings and plants under 

 glass by damping off, will doubt that our losses are often as 

 great if not greater from parasite or fungus plant growths than 

 from insects. 



It is seldom we get a crop of any kind without a valiant fight 

 for it. 



Fortunately we have learned to feel that we are greater than 

 the foes that assail us, and that with each new insect or fungus 

 pest soon comes a remedy with which we ma}"^ protect ourselves 

 if we will. 



