Proceedings of tee Farmer^ Club, 497 



and children can find ample emplo;yTnent and good pay in the small 

 fruit business, and this within sixty miles of New York city. I 

 came here a few years ago with my family, and with a small capital, 

 to get a support and to improve my health, and have gained both. 

 The land is well adapted to pears, strawberries, raspberries, cur- 

 rants, gooseberries and grapes, which are extensively raised. Last 

 3'ear the products of the town were about five hundred thousand 

 dollars, and the busmess can be increased a hundred fold. A oood 

 plan will be for a large number to purchase a lai'ge farm of fifty 

 or one hundred acres, to be set with fruit. Only a small advance 

 will be required. In the third year there will be full crops and 

 large profits, which will build each family a small cottage. Mr. S. 

 goes on to show that there will be a net profit every year of two 

 thousand three hundred dollars from five and a half acres. Besides 

 this, many vegetables can be raised. Much more is added, and 

 mainly to show that it is better than to go West. 



Mr. N. C. Meeker. — This is a good opening, but it requires not 

 less than one hundred dollars to put an acre in small fruits, and it 

 is necessary to understand the business. Fruit-growing is far from 

 being easy; in the shipping season it is like running a threshing 

 machiue. Our friend's plan, that several should unite and get a 

 large tract, is the time way. Fruit-growers lead on civilization 

 more than any other class; as a class, they never have existed any- 

 where till in this age. But they are wanted in the vicinity of one. 

 hundred and fifty cities in the West, as well as around New York. 

 Wherever they are, they should be in a body, so as to learn from 

 each other, and while they do so much to make laud valuable, they 

 ought to own enough to have a hand in the speculation. Wherever 

 cultivators of the soil get rich, it is as much through the rise of the 

 price of land as by labor. When a settlement of fruit-growers 

 bring small pieces of land into a state of high cultivation, the one 

 who owns the adjoining land, and lets it lie idle, makes the most 

 money. 



KANSAS. 



Mr. Amos Gore, Qarkstown, Rockland county, N. Y. — I have 

 attended the Club for the purpose of communicating some of my 

 experience of a Kansas life. 



In a statistical account lately published, it is stated that the num- 

 ber of emigrants to the United States, since the year 1860, exceeds 

 the amount of killed, wounded and disabled during the late civil war, 

 so that the exhaustion from that source has been more than supplied. 



fJNST.l 32 



