84 AMERICAN FARMS. 



THE FRUIT PROBLEM. 



As the great grain fields of the West have poured 

 their products into every market at home, the small 

 grain areas of the past have been converted into 

 orchards and vegetable plots ; and now there is not 

 only excessive production in cereals, but also in all 

 other field productions. Only a few months ago (June, 

 1888), fifteen to twenty thousand crates of fruit and 

 vegetables, " in good condition," were destroyed in New 

 York Harbor to relieve an overstocked market. Large 

 portions of the South, such as the country around Norfolk, 

 Virginia, have recently become devoted to fruit and vege- 

 table culture for Northern consumption. This production 

 will, do doubt, be vastly increased in the near future, if 

 the new cotton-picking machines, now under contem- 

 plation, drive the negroes from the industry of cotton- 

 picking, which has given so many of them employment 

 in the past. 



pelled to make in order to get the farmers to move their crops at all, 

 can easily be figured. He is not getting enough to pay for his seed 

 and his labor, and the result is seen in the wholesale default in inter- 

 est, not only on farm mortgages, but on farm implements and live- 

 stock, which are being foreclosed, and the producers of our abundant 

 harvests are left homeless and penniless in an unusually large number 

 of cases to face the inclemency of the winter. As a consequence there 

 is more or less uprising of the farming communities of the far West 

 against the demands of the Eastern loan companies, which have not 

 only kept up the old rates of interest, but in some cases have in- 

 creased them. Cases have come to public notice where 5 per cent, 

 per month is charged upon cattle mortgages. Between the exporters, 

 who refuse to take their crops, except of corn, even at these ruinous 

 prices, and the Eastern and local money-lenders, the farmers of the 

 country are being ground between the upper and neither millstone, 

 instead of their harvests, which are too abundant to house and too 

 cheap to market,' " 



