Vol. LXI. No. 2710 
NEW YORK, JANUARY 4, 1902. 
SI PER'YEAR. 
A’FARM TO BE PROUD OF. 
A VERMONT I8LAND HOME. 
The Farmer Makes the Farm. 
One good honest man in a community, exemplify¬ 
ing the Golden Rule in his daily life, does more good 
than the preacher’s preaching. One good farmer in a 
neighborhood, exemplifying the principles and prac¬ 
tice of good farming from year to year, is worth more 
than a dozen books on agriculture, or a hundred ex¬ 
periment station bulletins. To speak frankly, I would 
rather have his example than a year’s subscription 
to The R. N.-Y. [Yet all cannot live near him, and 
the paper can bring him to you.—Eds.] That is one 
reason (there are others) why I think highly of Thad- 
deus L. Kinney, of Grand Isle County, Vt. He is a 
good farmer, a man who understands his business, 
and a man who takes pride in it. I like to see a man 
who understands his business. The chap who op¬ 
erates the shell game at the county fair—‘'Now you 
see it, and now you don’t 
see it”—understands his 
business, and has my ad¬ 
miration, to a certain 
extent. Then it is a 
great thing for a man to 
have a pride in his 'busi¬ 
ness. One of the most 
evil influences in the 
present agricultural situ¬ 
ation, as everybody 
knows, is that many 
farmers are really, down 
deep, ashamed of farm¬ 
ing. Such a man is 
bound to fail. He’d be a 
failure if he were mak¬ 
ing $1,000 a month, sim¬ 
ply because he is ashamed 
of it. I never heard this 
matter stated better than 
by Mr. Kinney himself. 
He was addressing a 
farmers’ audience, and 
urging them to tidy up 
about their houses. He 
said: “You may say there 
is no money in this; it 
is all a matter of pride; 
but I tell you the man 
who has no pride in his 
business can’t make any 
money out of it.” 
That may be one rea¬ 
son why the tallest and 
straighfest flag pole in the county flings Old Glory to 
the breeze beside Mr. Kinney’s house. But there is 
another and deeper reason for it. The flag is for 
patriotism, and they say patriotism is largely a love 
of home. If you could know about those five boys 
and two girls, now men and women, that have formed 
one of the principal crops on this farm you would 
understand the whole story better. The farm con¬ 
tains about 280 acres, but the 20 acres of apple trees, 
mostly Spy and Greening, constitute the principal 
part of it. Mr. Kinney is known chiefly as an apple 
grower, and he would rather it would he so. I hough 
he takes a pride in all parts of the farm, he takes a 
double pride in this. 
His fruit storage house is a model of its kind. This 
statement is literally true, for many other houses in 
all parts of the country have been modeled after it. 
This house has been illustrated and described in sev¬ 
eral books and bulletins, and in nearly all the lead¬ 
ing agricultural papers in the country, including 
The R. N.-Y. I calculated the other day that there 
must have been above 100,000 copies of these pic¬ 
tures and descriptions circulated to American farmers 
within the last five years. That is one way in which 
a good farmer influences the world and makes his 
calling better. The fruit house is now filled up with 
apples for the Winter. It could tell some fine tales 
of profits made in the past, and let us hope it will 
have something of the same sort to tell next Spiing. 
In the live stock line Mr. Kinney cultivates Short¬ 
horn cattle and Shropshire sheep. He is proud of his 
calves, too; and they are proud of him. They are fat 
and sleek and content, and they know a good friend 
when he comes into the pasture. This year theie is 
a crop of corn that any man might be proud of, even 
though he had less propensity to glory in his busi¬ 
ness than Mr. Kinney has. He says: “It looks like 
western corn.” In fact, it does. There is a good crop 
of beans, too, this year; and beans are worth money. 
I never saw finer beans. They would make a Boston 
FAMOUS VISITORS IN MR. KINNEY’S Al’PLE ORCHARD. Fig. 1 . 
man’s mouth water. More reason to be proud. The 
potato crop is small this year, because very few were 
planted. Usually Mr. Kinney is a trifle enthusiastic 
over a large potato crop. It would make the spray 
missionary glad, too, to see him putting the Boideaux 
on those potatoes. 
Mr. Kinney was for five years president of the Ver¬ 
mont Horticultural Society, and is everywhere re¬ 
garded as the leading exponent of advanced horticul¬ 
ture in the State. The State Board of Agriculture, 
chronically given to booming the dairy industry, 
sends for him every year, and gets him to make a 
number of addresses in sections where they most 
need the gospel. Hundreds of visitors come to the 
farm every year, many of them from a distance, and 
they all enjoy it. At least I never heard of one’s ask¬ 
ing for his money back when he left. f. a. w. 
R N -Y.—Fig. 1 shows at the right with the apple 
in his hand Prof. John Craig, then Prof. S. A. Beach, 
Prof. C. L. Jones, of Vermont, Prof. J. L. Hills, Dr. 
True, of Washington, Mr. Kinney and Prof. F. A. 
Waugh, of the Vermont Experiment Station. 
AN EXPERIENCE WITH BOXED APPLES. 
From New York to California. 
At a recent meeting of the Niagara Co. (N. Y.) Farm¬ 
ers’ Club, W. H. Outwater gave a short talk on selling 
apples in boxes. This stirred up a lively discussion, so 
much so that we have asked Mr. Outwater to write out 
his experience, which follows: 
In 1896 I was induced by the secretary of the Ameri¬ 
can Fruit Growers’ Union to box a car of apples -or 
the California market. I secured some boxes; the di¬ 
mensions were Iiy 2 xl2x22, what was called the Cali¬ 
fornia bushel box, and I think they are the same size 
as was used by some of my neighbors who put up 
their pears in boxes this year. There was a National 
meeting of the National Fruit Growers’ Union in Buf¬ 
falo that year, about March 1, which I attended with 
a box of Baldwin apples packed ready for shipment. 
I took them up as a sample, to see if they were put 
up right. A picture of the box is shown at Fig. 2. 
They were pronounced right, a car furnished, and on 
March 10 the car was 
shipped to the agent of 
the Union at Dos Ange¬ 
les, Cal., and 1 wrote to 
the agent asking him to 
send me any criticisms 
suggested that would aid 
me in future packing. He 
replied on receipt of the 
car that the apples came 
all.right, were properly 
packed, and the finest 
fruit he had seen in the 
market there that season. 
In packing we graded to 
three sizes, and packed 
the sizes to fit the box, 
tiering the different sizes 
to fit the boxes. As they 
were red apples we used 
white paper and put it 
only in the bottom of the 
oox, letting it come 
about half way up on the 
sides of the box. Of 
course that was the top 
of the box when opened, 
although aside from the 
paper there was no dif¬ 
ference to speak of which 
side or top or bottom 
was opened, as the apples 
all lie in tiers any way 
you look at them. After 
the box was filled we 
nailed the bottom on, then turned the box over and 
marked it for the best apples XXX, those next smaller 
we marked XX, and the smallest ones were marked 
X. In shipping we counted three boxes to the barrel, 
and in figuring the price per barrel we counted three 
bushels per barrel, and they netted me $1.36 per bar¬ 
rel, while apples here were selling at from 60 to 90 
cents per barrel the same year. Soon after shipping 
west, I got word from one of our county men who was 
in Atlanta, Ga., who wanted to know whether I had 
apples to ship, and if so to ship to him and he would 
do the best he could. I wrote that I would ship a 
car, and in it would be 25 or 30 boxes. He wrote that 
he had Ms doubts about boxes, as the people there 
were used to barrels, and would not take kindly to 
boxes, but I shipped them, advising him to do the 
best he could with them. The apples went through 
all right. This was about April 1. He afterwards 
told me it was hard work to get the grocery men to 
take the boxes, but once they had them they went 
quo 
