84 



per day for each cat. The rats will feed on the carcasss of the cats 

 from which the skins have been taken, giving each rat a fourth of 

 a cat. The business will be self-supporting and automatic. The 

 cats will eat the rats and the rats will eat the cats, and the company 

 will get the skins. Telegraph your order. 



My county ''Little Orleans," is less than twenty by twenty-five 

 miles in size, yet it produces more apples than any place the same size 

 in the world, and has thousands of acres of young orchards not pro- 

 ducing Yet, "but soon." Five shipping points in western New York 

 ship more apples than the entire states of Washington and Oregon. 



Our county has seven cold or chemical storage houses with a 

 capacity of 313,000 barrels, which did not begin to take the apples 

 produced this year when a light crop. What will the fruit growers 

 do with their apples when a full crop. This year many of the apples 

 were sent out of the county to be stored, as long as storage could be 

 obtained. When no more storage could be secured, apples were sold 

 at a low price. Some storages that had promised to take growers' 

 apples suddenly gave out the notice, "Storage all taken, no more 

 room.'' One storage that gave out this report had an agreement with 

 a western buyer not to raise the price of apples and they would both 

 get apples cheap and the western buyer would store 20,000 barrels 

 with this storage. This buyer takes annually from our town for a 

 couple months work enough clear money to buy one of the best 

 farms in the county. It is reported now that the storage was not 

 filled. ]\Iany growers could get no storage, so sold out and when 

 they finished drawing could have secured from 50 cents to 75 cents 

 per barrel more for their apples than they sold for earlier. This 

 was a clear loss and could have been saved if there had been storage 

 room. 



My storage bill this year is over $2,000 besides the extra cost of 

 drawing apples to the storage and the loss of time waiting to unload 

 when at the storage. During the busy time, an hour or more of 

 waiting to unload is quite a frequent occurrence. Then again the 

 loss on a crop stored in the ordinary storages from the practice of 

 the storage men in always expecting to handle all the apples stored 

 with them. Besides the legitimate 40 cents storage charge, they 

 always want to make a profit as big as possible and some years 

 doubling their money. One time the storage men by accident froze 

 the top three tiers of barrels over my entire block of apples. The 

 damage was not discovered until I took an out-of-town dealer to 

 look at the apples. The storage man said, "W^ll, I knew your 

 apples were very badly covered with fungus, so I put the tempera- 

 ture down to keep the fungus from spreading." He stopped it. 

 He bought the apples and when he took them out, said they were the 

 best apples in the storage. 



P'or some time, I have had an idea of a farmers' storage, but 

 at the present time all the farmers, who were interested and ready 

 to go in, have been bought off with promises or scared out by a mis- 

 representation of conditions. When I began to look up the storage 

 proposition, I thought I knew a lot about storage, but it is like mak- 

 ing books, "There is no end." In our section there are two kinds of 

 chemical storages used and each advocate is sure his kind of chem- 



