RELATION TO THE FARMER 269 



sively, and he always suffers some injury, large or 

 small in proportion to the activity of his campaign 

 against them. What is not always realized by the 

 passive resistant is that what he loses is all profit. 

 It costs about so much to prepare, plant and harvest 

 an acre of corn, wheat, potatoes, cabbage or other 

 crop, and if the insects eat 10 per cent, of what would 

 have been produced had they been destroyed, that 10 

 per cent, is directly out of the farmer's pocket. And 

 if in two orchards of the same variety, producing exactly 

 the same number of barrels of apples, those from the 

 one are clean as the result of an active campaign and 

 the latter gnarled and wormy from curculio and codling 

 moth, the difference in price between the fancy fruit 

 selling at the top of the market, and the other fit only 

 for the cider mill, is the measure of loss, since the cost of 

 handling and growing is practically identical. 



It has been attempted again and again to calculate 

 and estimate the annual loss of agricultural products 

 due to insect ravages in the United States and Canada, 

 and no one has fixed it in figures of less than hundreds 

 of millions. As a matter of fact, the money loss is 

 difficult of estimation, because any material addition to 

 the amount of a crop might have a decided influence 

 on its price. It is not uncommon, for instance, for a 

 farmer to make more money on a short crop than out 

 of an excessive one, and this factor has been- previously 

 noted by Dr. L. O. Howard, in his discussion of the 

 same subject. A better basis, perhaps, is the percent- 

 age of crop destroyed, and that has been estimated at 

 anywhere from 10 per cent, to 25 per cent, of the total. 

 The careful student will be inclined to consider the 10 

 per cent, estimate too low; it is doubtful whether, in 

 actual lessening of crop, it will reach the 25 per cent, 

 mark; but if we take into consideration the lessened 



