2 THE OUTLOOK FOR ORCHARDING 



The Question of Over-production. — To begin with, are we 

 in such immediate and pressing- danger from over-production? 

 It is true that the papers are full of accounts of men who 

 have started orchards; it is also true that any one who is sup- 

 posed to know about such matters is besieged, either pereonally 

 or by letter, by those who want to grow fruit, and it is probably 

 true that where there is so much smoke there must be more or less 

 fire. But the writer is very strongly of the opinion that the 

 percentage of smoke is very large. 



Census Figures. — There are various methods by which we 

 may judge of the imminence of this over-production danger, 

 none of them perhaps verj^ accurate but all of them suggestive. 

 The first consists of the United States figures, Uncle Sam's esti- 

 mate on the subject. If we take the question of apples alone, 

 which of course is the big end of the subject, we find first that the 

 production has steadily declined since 1896. Here are the esti- 

 mates from 1895 to 1911. 



1895 — 60,500,000 barrels 



1896—69,000,000 barrels 



1897—41,000,000 barrels 



1898—28,500,000 barrels 



1899—58,500,000 barrels 



1900—57,000,000 barrels 



1901 — 26,970,000 barrels 



1902—46,025,000 barrels 



1903 — 42,626,000 barrels 



1904—45,360,000 barrels 

 1905—24,300,000 barrels 

 1906—38,280,000 barrels 

 1907—29,540,000 barrels 

 1908—25,850,000 barrels 

 1909—25,415,000 barrels 

 1910—23,825,000 barrels 

 1911—28,600,000 barrels 



Are not these figures tremendously significant and do they 

 not seem to indicate that it will be several years before we get 

 back even to our former high-water mark? And we must not 

 forget that at the same time that the production of apples has 

 been declining the population has been increasing, so that it 

 will require many more apples than 69,000,000 barrels to pro- 

 vide as many per capita as we had in 1896. 



Another significant fact along the same line, which is brought 

 out by the census figures, is in relation to the apple trees of the 

 country. There were in 1910 in round numbers fifty million less 

 bearing apple trees than in 1900 and only sixty-five million trees 



