1900 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
5o5 
MARKET BRIEFS. 
Picked Up Here and There. 
BUTTER DEALERS FAIL.—A sub¬ 
scriber wishes us to look up the financial 
standing of I. T. Hunter & Co., said to be 
engaged in the butter business at 294 Duane 
Street, this city. This concern recently 
made an assignment, and is not considered 
worthy of credit. 
MACKEREL ought to be cheap the com¬ 
ing season. The catch on the Atlantic 
coast is said to be unusually large, more 
than nine times that of last year. At 
Gloucester, Mass., on July 8, 4,400 barrels 
were landed, worth at present prices $40,000. 
The catch of cod from the Banks is also 
reported heavy. 
GREEN CORN from the South is selling 
at a low figure, from 25 cents to $1 per 100. 
Some is not worth the freight. A little 
from Jersey is doing better. Some growers, 
in their eagerness to be first in the market, 
make the mistake of picking it when it is 
nothing but cob with a few little watery 
kernels. No one wishes such stuff, and it 
is quite likely to land in the garbage barrel. 
SOUTHERN PEACHES are here in 
abundance. A few recent shipments have 
arrived in bad order on account of the ex¬ 
tremely hot weather of last week, and had 
to be sold at once at a discount—as low as 
50 to 75 cents per crate. The better grades 
are selling readily at $1 to $1.75 per crate, 
and fancy as high as $2 to $2.25. There is 
no surplus of prime fruit, and the price is 
likely to remain high for some time. So 
many poor peaches have been offered rlfis 
season that consumers are getting ando js 
for something better. 
POTA TOES are very low, prime Southern 
Rose going at from 50 cents to $1 per bar¬ 
rel. For the past two or “three years 
growers in the South found the potato 
business so profitable that they made the 
mistake of planting too large an acreage 
this season. Also some of the recent re¬ 
ceipts have rotted on the way, and buyers 
have been afraid to handle them without 
close inspection of every barrel. To add 
to the other unfortunate conditions it is 
now getting so late that all Southern tubers 
will have to be rushed in as soon as pos¬ 
sible, before much of the Long Island stock 
comes into market. 
RECEIPTS OF WATERMELONS are 
heavy, and prices have dropped to $10 to 
$20 per 100. The volume of trade depends 
largely upon the weather. A cool week, 
like the earlier part of the present one, less¬ 
ens the demand, and, with heavy shipments 
pouring in all of the time, the market soon 
gets upset. In hot weather the hotels 
and restaurants serve an immense amount 
of watermelons, charging 10 cents for a 
big slice, all that one wishes to eat. A 
good many people buy fruits in the down¬ 
town markets of the city, and take them 
to their homes in the suburbs. A big 
watermelon is about as unhandy a thing 
to carry under your arm as a live cat, but 
some one has invented a little net made of 
jute cord, which will hold the watermelon 
so that it can be handled as conveniently 
as a grip sack. 
A POMOLOGICAL INTERLOPER.—In a 
fancy fruit store were some Peach melons, 
said to come from Georgia. They were 
about four inches long by two in diameter, 
lemon color, and 10 cents each. The man 
claimed that it was a new fruit and all 
right to eat out of hand. The seeds re¬ 
sembled those of a muskmelon, and the 
flesh, which was white, tasted something 
like a ripe cucumber. To eat raw it was 
certainly a failure. Possibly it should have 
been cooked like a squash. It is a mis¬ 
take to misrepresent a thing in this way, 
and everyone who spent 10 cents for one 
of those Peach melons will feel swindled 
and charge the money up to his experience 
account. New fruits that have any merit 
will sell here even if the price be high, for 
like the Athenians in Paul’s time there are 
plenty who are looking for “some new 
thing”; but, after being buncoed in this 
way, people get suspicious and are less apt 
to try really worthy novelties. To work 
up a trade of this sort the grower should 
see that the stuff gets into the hands of 
retailers who will sell it for what it is and 
say how it is to be prepared for eating. 
_ w. w. H. 
THROUGH NEW YORK STATE. 
Drought and the Crops. 
Part II. 
A Hustler.— J. E. Allis, of Orleans 
County, is probably the greatest hustler, 
in the way of a farmer, that I struck on 
the trip. Besides his own large farm it 
is said that he rents all the available land 
in the neighborhood. I found him culti¬ 
vating a peach orchard of 2,000 trees with 
a Johnson Harvester Company extension- 
disk harrow. This harrow has an exten¬ 
sion running out to one side, with a set 
of disks which run up under the trees, 
while the driver sits over that part of the 
harrow which runs midway between the 
rows. He says he will keep up the culti¬ 
vation until August. He has the Early 
Crawford, Elberta and Crosby. He has 
treated the orchard to a covering of wood 
ashes, muriate of potash and ground bone. 
The potash is already evident in the color 
of the fruit. There seems to be little dif¬ 
ference this year in the three varieties in 
point of production—all the trees are load¬ 
ed, probably three times more than they 
will be able to carry without breaking 
down. This simply leaves a job of thin¬ 
ning. The Elberta he calls the finest- 
flavored peach ever put in a can, but a 
little difficult to grow. The Crosby is a 
late peach, but the trees bear younger than 
any other variety. They are tough and 
hardy, and no -Winter hurts them. Last 
year, when three years old, they bore three 
baskets to a tree, which were worth $1 a 
basket. This year they promise four or five 
baskets to the tree. Mr. Allis considers 
this the most profitable peach he grows. 
He has set another young orchard of 2,000 
trees. Mr. Allis has a big lot of work, 
but he believes that “all work and no play 
makes Jack a dull boy.” The day before 
I met him he had his 19 working men off 
for a day's vacation to ivagara Falls; the 
expense of which he bore himself, in addi¬ 
tion to paying the men their regular wages 
for the day. Those men will probably pay 
him Interest on the investment before the 
season is over. 
Early Sheep.— Clark Allis is the great 
hothouse lamb grower and shipper of Me¬ 
dina. At the present time I think he is 
running about 300 ewes, and they seem to 
own the farm. The drought is producing 
a shortage in pasture, but Mr. Allis’s sheep 
do not suffer in consequence. He provides 
for the shortage in growing rape, vetch, 
corn, oats, rye, Alfalfa and radishes. The 
radishes afford better sheep pasture for 
him than Alfalfa. The vetch he has hardly 
given a fair trial, but rape is a success. 
He feeds it down three times in the season. 
He seems to have a faculty of getting 
earlier lambs than most growers, but when 
I approached him on the ways and means 
he drifted suddenly to another subject. He 
evidently doesn’t want to give away all his 
good things. He, however, placed me 
under obligations by an extensive drive, 
which gave me an opportunity of observing 
some the fine farming country of Orleans 
County. 
Dairy Doings. —At the Geneva Station I 
found the dairy department busy testing 
Babcock test bottles, as provided by recent 
State statute. They told me that most of 
the new bottles are about correct. There 
is more variety in the old ones, many 
of them running off from seven to eight- 
tenths. Prof. Smith is continuing his ex¬ 
periments with cheese; ripening it in tem¬ 
peratures from 50 to 80 degrees, and hold¬ 
ing from four weeks to several months in 
order to test results. The best results so 
far seem to come from cheese ripened in 
rooms of a temperature from 50 to 60 de¬ 
grees. “Try to impress your people,” he 
said to me, “with the importance of care 
in the ripening room.” This has been the 
burden of his story for many years at 
farmers’ institutes and dairy meetings. 
Dr. Jordan is particularly proud of these 
ripening rooms, and the automatic arrange¬ 
ments for controlling the temperature. 
The cold is produced by the ammonia pro¬ 
cess, and the heat by the Johnson system 
of hot-air pipes. The combined applica¬ 
tion of these systems is, so far as I have 
observed, a novel one, and is so arranged 
with automatic valves that a fixed tem¬ 
perature once secured is maintained regu¬ 
larly by means of these automatic valves. 
_ J. J. D. 
MILK MEETING AT BINGHAMTON. 
Resolutions Adopted.—O n Thursday, 
July 12, at the Arlington Hotel, Bingham¬ 
ton, N. Y., there was a joint meeting of 
the sales committee of the Five States Milk 
Producers’ Association and the advisory 
committee appointed from various sections 
of the territory covered by the Association 
to discuss plans for selling their milk to 
the best advantage. There was a free ex¬ 
pression of opinion, and the committee on 
resolutions reported the following, which 
were adopted: 
Resolved, Inasmuch as the sale : of our 
milk was not effected by July 1 it shall be 
the duty of the sales and advisory com¬ 
mittees either to effect a sale of the milk 
before September 1, or to fix a uniform 
price at which the milk of the Association 
shall continue to be sold to the present 
dealers, and, if such price be not accepted 
by such dealers, then all of the milk of 
the Association shall be withheld from the 
market and manufactured into butter an 1 
cheese until such time as our just and 
reasonable demands be acceded to; and we 
hereby ask each and every local section 
to take such means during the intervening 
time as will enable them to comply with 
the action of the sales and advisory com¬ 
mittees. 
Resolved, That, as many members of 
the Five States Milk Producers’ Associa¬ 
tion have contracted their milk until Octo¬ 
ber 1, we earnestly ask and urge that no 
milk of the Association be contracted be¬ 
yond that time. 
A Strong Position.— This Association is 
very much alive, and has not the slightest 
idea of giving up. The members under¬ 
stand that the task of handling the selling 
end of the business so that a living profit 
may be realized is a difficult one, requiring 
time, thought and hard work. They are 
looking the matter right in the face, get¬ 
ting down to rock bottom, and laying a 
foundation for permanent results. Per¬ 
haps these results may not come about by 
just the methods used at present. In 
nearly all enterprises the original plans 
have to be modified many times. It would 
seem as though the resolutions named 
cover the ground as well as can be done 
at present, and, if thoroughly lived up to, 
they mean a definite forward step. 
Would a Hold-up Be Effective?— 
There is no doubt that a general holding 
back of the milk of the Association would 
seriously embarrass the New York dealers. 
It is well-known that the little incident of 
last May, when an order was given to with¬ 
hold the milk on certain railroad lines for 
a time, opened the eyes of the dealers, but 
this was only a drop in the bucket. Sup¬ 
pose the whole 20,000 cans controlled by 
the Association had been withheld? The 
better class of dealers wish to avoid any¬ 
thing of this sort. They know that there 
Is nothing to be gained by it in the long 
run. Even if they can get a fair supply 
from other sources, no one will long sell 
to them at a starvation figure. They 
would soon have to raise the price any¬ 
way. Common sense seems to indicate 
the wisdom of sticking to those who have 
been supplying them so long; and, while 
some dealers may feel grumpy, and put on 
a big bluff, most of them are too busy to 
waste time in doing anything for mere, 
spite to get even with the farmers. On 
the other hand, the producers are not in 
favor of a strike, except as a last resort. 
Fighting is largely a loss of time all 
around. If, when the matter is brought to 
a crisis, and the dealers see that the farm¬ 
ers really mean what they say, and are 
prepared to stand by it, they conclude to 
meet them part way, without the disagree¬ 
able consequences of a hold-up, so much 
the better. There are signs of this. Some 
of the dealers have said honestly that they 
know the producers have just cause for 
complaint. Perhaps a thorough under¬ 
standing may be brought about by firm 
and united action, that will straighten the 
matter out. It is not necessary for either 
side to get down on its knees to the other, 
but simply to come to a fair, permanent, 
business basis. 
Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel.— 
Lovers of fair play sympathize with the 
farmers in this struggle, not In any senti¬ 
mental way, but simply because fair treat¬ 
ment has been a scarce article with them. 
Those who may be getting impatient should 
remember that it takes time to do any¬ 
thing worth while, and that in an under¬ 
taking of this sort some mistakes are sure 
to be made. One way to help a thing 
along is not to hinder it by unjust criti¬ 
cism or slurring remarks. Cold water is 
a good thing to throw into a man’s face 
to wake him up, but it is not needed by of¬ 
ficers or committees who are doing their 
best. Part of the progress of the Associa¬ 
tion is seen in the increased price of milk 
the past season. In some sections of the 
Chenango Valley, two years ago, milk was 
sold at 1 1-10 cent per quart. As already 
intimated, a large part of this labor is 
foundation work which is not • visible. 
Those who have made the most careful 
study of this matter in all its phases are 
making the fewest criticisms on the man¬ 
agement. It is probable that eventually 
the farmers will handle the milk from the 
cow to the consumer. If, when this is ac¬ 
complished, they attempt to abuse their 
power, it is to be hoped that they will be 
taught a lesson themselves, as they cer¬ 
tainly will. _ w. w. H. 
Crimson Clover Seed Crop. 
Condition of seed crop for 1900 is not up 
to the average in either quality or quan¬ 
tity. The heavy rains and long-continued 
wet spell, immediately following the cut¬ 
ting, caused the seed to become discolored, 
and much of it to waste in handling. The 
yield per acre was about half of an aver¬ 
age crop, with a moderate acreage, as a 
prospective short hay crop induced many 
farmers to cut their clover for hay, instead 
of saving for seed as first intended. Seed 
is selling in a wholesale way from $4.20 to 
$4.50 per bushel of 60 pounds. I do not 
think any change will be made in growing 
the crop on account of the Green pea- 
louse, which is claimed by scientific men 
to be harbored in the clover. I do not 
personally know of a single Instance where 
the feeding of Crimson clover hay was in¬ 
jurious in any way, and have been feeding 
It more or less to both work and driving 
horses for the past eight or 10 years, with 
only the best and entirely satisfactory re¬ 
sults. With this experience I feel safe 
in recommending farmers to feed It in 
moderation, as horses are fond of it, and 
will eat more than is good for them if al¬ 
lowed to. The secret of safety, in my 
opinion, is in cutting the clover early, just 
before it appears to be in fullest and 
brightest bloom. When that time arrives, 
cut your clover as rapidly as possible. A 
few days’ delay changes conditions rapidly, 
and my practice has been to cut at that 
time without any regard to weather con¬ 
ditions. Our crop this year is as bright 
and free from dust as the best of Timothy 
hay. c. b. 
Milford, Del. 
The condition of the Crimson clover seed 
crop here is good, but little is grown in 
this vicinity, and the Cambridge seed 
stores could quote me no prices. The 
Green pea-louse will have no results in 
changing the Crimson clover crop this year. 
Cow peas are being more extensively seed¬ 
ed every year. We find fully as good re¬ 
sults from them both as hay and as a soil 
improver. r. l. g. 
Maryland. 
Only one person here whom I know has 
cut any seed; it is in good condition, and 
he wants $5 a bushel. This same man 
planted six acres of peas for marketing 
green, and, strange to say, they were 
ruined by the Green pea-louse. They were 
planted next to Crimson clover. It is too 
soon to say what effect this discovery, if 
any, will have on those who will use it as 
a catch crop. The cow pea is growing in 
favor each year as a catch crop. 
Delaware. j. e. c. 
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«I wish to express my thanks to you for 
your wouderful medicine,” writes Mr. Geo. 
I.ogan Dogget, of Piedmont, Greenville Co., 
S. C., Box 167 . "I was almost past work 
suffering so much from chronic catarrh and 
indigestion. Your ‘Golden Medical Discov¬ 
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months, and was completely cured of indi¬ 
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Book Bargains. 
We have quite a large stock of good 
books, that we wish to close out. We 
are going to make the price on them so 
that they will go quick. My Handker¬ 
chief Garden is one of these. It shows 
what can be done with a small plot of 
ground. It is nicely printed on good 
paper, and illustrated. Paper cover. 
The price has been 20 cents. We will 
close out the remaining stock now at 10 
cents, postpaid. Modification of Plants 
by Climate is another pamphlet that 
every practical grower will appreciate 
The price is 25 cents. We will close them 
out at 10 cents, postpaid. Or we will 
send both of these books, postpaid, as 
a reward for sending one new subscrip¬ 
tion at $1. 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
NEW YORK. 
