HAMPSHIRE COUNTY FARMERS' MONTHLY 



FARMERS' MONTHLY 



PUBLISHED BY THE 



Hampshire County Trustees for Aid to 

 Agriculture 



STAFF 

 Roland A. Payne, County Agent 

 Mrs. Edith U. French, 



Home Deiiioiistriitioii Atrent 

 Bena G. F^rharil, County Club Affent 

 Blary C. OTeary, Clerk 



Office First National Bank Building 

 Northampton, Mass. 



Entered as second class matter Nov. 9, 191.5. at the 

 Post Office at Northampton, Massachusetts, under 

 the Act of March 8, IhTa. 



"Notice of Kntry " 



"Acceptance for mailing at special rate of post 

 age provided for in section 1103, Act of October 3 

 1917. Authorized October 31. 1917." 



Price, 50 cents a year 



Officers of the Trustees 



Edwin B. Clapp, President 

 Charles E. Clark, Vice-President 

 Wanen M. King, Treasurer 

 Roland A. Payne, Secretary 



Trustees for County Aid to Agriculture 



Edwin B. Clapp, Easthampton 

 Charles E. Clark, Leeds 

 Clarence E, Hodgkins, Northampton 

 William N. Howard, Ware 

 Milton S. Howes, Cummington 

 Mis. Clifton Johnson, Hadley 

 Warren M. King, Northampton 

 •John A. Sullivan, Northampton 

 Charles W. Wade, Hatfield 



BROKEN FRUIT TREES 



MAY BE SAVED 



Consider Carefully Before Cutting Them 

 Down 



R. A. VanMeter 

 Extension Specialist in Pomology, M.A.C. 



Many of the fruit trees that were split 

 by the storm in late November will yet 

 make good trees if they are given a 

 chance. On old trees large branches 

 that are particularly valuable may be 

 drawn back into place and bolted. Young 

 trees that lost scaffold branches will 

 usually balance themselves as they grow 

 by filling in the injured side with new 

 branches, if a reasonably good piece of a 

 tree is left standing. 



At any rate considerable judgment is 

 required in handling the.se trees and it 

 will not help matters to rush into the 

 orchard with an axe and complete the de- 

 struction. 



Both Old and Young Trees may be 

 Repaired 



A great many of the old trees that have 

 been injured are not worth much atten- 

 Uontinued on page 7, column 2 



WORLD BUSINESS REVIVAL 

 MUST PRECEDE 



AGRICULTURAL PROSPERITY 



"The farmer is in economic distress to- 

 day not only because the prices for his 

 products have fallen, but because they 

 have fallen very much more than for 

 the commodities he buys," writes Dr. R. 

 J. McFall, Professor of Marketing of the 

 Massachusetts Agricultural College Ex- 

 tension Service, in Economic Studies, No. 

 5. 



"The most prominent single fact to- 

 day in the economics of agriculture is 

 that the prices of farm products have de- 

 clined on the average to about the pre- 

 war level, while the prices of the goods 

 farmers want to buy are still 50 per 

 cent higher than they were before the 

 war. As a western farmer expressed it 

 to a firm which manufactures agricul- 

 tural implements: 'I need a wagon and 

 my dealer wants the price of 650 bu.shels 

 of coin for the same wagon I could buy 

 with 200 bushels of corn before the war. 

 The harness man wants the price of a 

 wagon load of hides for a No. 1 harness.' 

 The press is full of talk of revival of busi- 

 ness, but so long as the farmer is con- 

 fronted with the situation that his prod- 

 ucts have radically declined in value in 

 comparison with the commodities he 

 purchases, just so long can the depres- 

 sion be expected to continue in agricul- 

 ture. 



"It is unfortunate that those who dis- 

 cuss this problem are so prone to look 

 upon the unbalanced price situation as 

 a prime cause in itself, and speak of the 

 readjustment merely as a matter of jus- 

 tice. It is a common thing for the 

 friends of agriculture to denounce some 

 one somewhere as having committed this 

 crime against agriculture. It would be 

 much better if we could realize that there 

 is a cause for all these things too deep and 

 underlying for any group of men to have 

 created. Impersonal and unfeeling econo- 

 mic factors have been working, and are 

 still at work, that are keeping agriculture 

 in a state of depression. The first step 

 in the control of these factors is their dis- 

 covery, and the second step is under- 

 standing these factors and their control. 

 The situation is too serious for any waste 

 of time in denouncing people or facts. 

 As a recent writer says of the factors dis- 

 turbing wages, 'The wise man takes ac- 

 count of them and adapts his policies to 

 them'. 



"One factor in this situation is that 

 all our systems of internal distribution 

 are practically free from foreign compe- 

 tition and are maintaining their war- 

 time scale of charges. Eventually our 

 railway brothers, and even our retailers, 

 will feel the lash if they maintain then- 

 old demands where the French the Ger- 

 man and the British transportation men 

 Continued on page 5, column 2 



MARKET GARDEN NOTES 



Quality in seed refers to the following 

 characteristics: viability; characteristics 

 inherited from parent plants; freedom 

 from impurities. The first is easy to test. 

 Reports assure us that it is immensely 

 important to make that test on vegetable 

 seeds before the 1922 planting season. 

 The inherited quality of seeds can only be 

 tested by production for market. It is 

 the most important qualification. The 

 best celery and cabbage growers make a 

 year's test in advance to insure knowledge 

 of the real quality of their seed. Vegeta- 

 ble seeds hardly suffer at all from impuri- 

 ties such as weed seeds and dirt. It is 

 entire'y possible for every grower to pre- 

 vent serious losses through poor seed. 



Improvement in crop quality may be 

 through disease resistance bred into the 

 seed. That was well illustrated at the 

 Market Garden Field Station and on the 

 farms of Howard S. Russell, of Wayland; 

 L. L. LaMontagne & Son of Woburn ; and 

 VVyman Brothers of Arlington. Seed 

 grown from "yellow.s" resistant spinach 

 stock furnished by the Norfolk Truck 

 Experiment Station of Virginia, has 

 proved quite resistant to "yellows" during 

 the fall of 1921. It will be possible to 

 provide very limited amounts of this 

 strain of spinach seed to a few men who 

 will promise to grow some seed from it. 

 I It is probable that this disease resistant 

 j quality will decrease without special at- 

 tention to selection for "yellows" resist- 

 ance. No guarantee goes with this seed 

 for it was received by the Field Station 

 for test and experiment, and will be dis- 

 tributed for the same reason. Talk to 

 your county agent about the possibility of 

 getting some. 



Economical production of high grade 

 product will be absolutely necessary to 

 insure business success. Ways to in- 

 crea.se profit are: 



i. Larger yields per acre. 



2. Less waste ground through a poor 

 stand of plants. 



.3. Timely tillage. 



4. Proper fertilization. 



5. Elimination of losses through 

 disease and insect pests. 



Today Massachusetts celery growers 

 are suffering because of poor quality 

 celery going to market from pits. The 

 way is being made easy for Florida, New 

 York and California celery because 

 Massachusetts celery is in poor condition. 

 It is hardly our purpose to make a mar- 

 ket for our competitors, yet we are doing 

 it. Come to the meeting of the Massa- 

 chusetts State Vegetable Growers Asso- 

 ciation, the morning of -January 18th, at 

 Horticulture Hall, Boston, and talk over 

 ways of preventing these losses, and in- 

 creasing our own market. 



