I9ir>. 
J I I li NK\\>VO,R,KKK 
331 
A 6000-BUSHEL POTATO CROP. 
Grown By a Back-to-the-Lander. 
T HIS is the story of a baek-to-the-lander who. 
as he says, bought an old farm and "simply, 
ate, drank and slept potatoes.” The result 
of this high living was that last season he grew 
0.000 bushels on 20 acres. lie calls it the “most im¬ 
portant ever grown in Connecticut” because he, a 
green man, went to school to Prof. Clinton of the 
Experiment Station and followed accurate scientific 
advice. 
Up to 15)00 Joseph A. Fagan, then 44 years old, 
had lived in Hartford, with no experience in farm¬ 
ing. Most men at 44 are about as pliable and teach¬ 
able as a knothole in a pine hoard. They either 
know it all and are beyond teaching or as vision¬ 
ary as children about the profits of farming. Mr. 
Fagan bought the old Scott's Swamp Farm in the 
town of Farmington. It had remained in the family 
of one of the old settlers from the day when the 
Indians sold it to the original ancestors. The In¬ 
dians were good farmers in their way. No doubt 
in their wigwams and around their fires they held 
what would now pass for farmers' institutes, i hey 
knew good land for corn, beans, squash and pota¬ 
toes when they saw it. and their old camping 
ground was right on this farm. When Mr. Fagan 
bought it the farm had struck 
bottom in production. lie 
says it did not grow grass 
enough to “set a hen.” The 
lields were well covered with 
brush and cedars, and the 
other foul stuff which crowds 
in when man grows weary or 
quits. 
We have told in former 
years how Mr. Fagan went at 
the job. lie knew that labor 
without thought was as dead 
as “faith without works.” 
and so as he says he "hound¬ 
ed the Department of Agricul¬ 
ture and the Connecticut Sta¬ 
tion and college” for informa¬ 
tion. He says farmers do not 
make use of these agencies 
half as much as they should. 
You ask him which State 
leads the Union in useful re¬ 
search work and he will tell 
you Connecticut is far in the 
lead. 
Mr. Fagan started with a 
naturally good farm in poor 
condition. He figured out his 
problem about as follows: “I 
must fit this soil by drainage, 
lime if needed, plenty of or¬ 
ganic matter and good tillage 
and rotation. Then I must 
use an abundance of suitable 
plant food and keep my crop 
free from disease until frost.” 
That in brief is what he has 
done. It is too long a story 
for us to tell here how the 
soil was worked into condi¬ 
tion year by year until it 
would have supported 50 In¬ 
dians where one grew before! 
For plant food for the potato crop Mr. Fagan began 
with a standard high-grade potato fertilizer, using 
some 4,800 pounds per acre each year and continu¬ 
ing to use the same mixture. The method of culture 
may he briefly stated—get the soil as fit as possible, 
plant good seed early and keep the soil everlastingly 
stirred up. From choice he would take a sod. Most 
farmers prefer to plant corn on sod, but it is largely 
(Continued on page ?/■/) 
“THE GREATEST OF ALL IS PACKAGE.” 
Reaching Out for Profitable Trade. 
HANGING CONDITIONS.—Producing more and 
better fruit, and then letting the other fellow 
sell it at his own price, has so increased the 
cost of production and lowered the net sales returns 
that a problem in cost reduction and more efficient 
salesmanship now confronts the fruit grower, who 
has any hope of a profitable future in the business. 
The American public has been and is yet being ed¬ 
ucated to expect greater size, beauty and perfection 
of quality in all our fruits, and to secure these there 
in bound to be a greatly added cost for labor, fertil¬ 
izers, spray materials, packages, etc. In my own 
case costs have doubled within the past 25 years 
with no corresponding increase in selling price, and 
with competition steadily increasing the only event¬ 
ual answer for many of us is failure, unless we can 
devise some means of reaching the consumer far 
more directly than we do now. The key to this, it 
appears to me, is tied up in packages, grading and 
packing, cooperation, advertising and transporta¬ 
tion, and the greatest of these is packages. Pack¬ 
ages to cover the requirements of all sorts of trans¬ 
portation problems and yet deliver fruit in good 
order; packages that enable the fruit to be exposed 
in an attractive manner: packages of various sizes 
to suit the reasonable demands of all classes of 
consumers; rigid packages of light weight and mod¬ 
erate cost, and if possible packages of one general 
uniform style and in sizes of 5, 10, 20. 25, :i(), 40 
and 50 pounds capacity, suitable for parcel post 
transportation; and possibly a cheaper style of 
eackage of some capacity that can he used in the 
direct delivery trade between producer and consum¬ 
er, or through the retail dealer as at times seems 
best. 
DEAEEltS AND GROWERS.—This package ques¬ 
tion must be properly solved before we can go very 
far on the way to direct and profitable trade with 
consumers. To do this will take much thought, time 
and money, and we fruit growers of the East have 
not yet acquired the habit of investing any of our 
money in any sort of .promotion business that may 
or may not be helpful to us and our business hitm¬ 
en. If any one doubts this, just let him write to U. 
Grant Border of Baltimore, Maryland, and obtain 
from him a record of how much money producers of 
apples have contributed to the apple advertising 
fund carried on by him for the past two years for 
the International Apple Shippers’ Association. My 
impression is that thus far the dealers have con¬ 
tributed fully ten dollars to every one from the 
g rower. 
FORMING A PRIZE FUND.—Far too many of 
us have been depending on the other fellow to at¬ 
tend to the business end of things. No doubt in 
time self interest of some package inventor or man¬ 
ufacturer will develop packages, such as we need, 
while to hasten the day will take money. The only 
hope I see in sight for a good bunch of money to 
come promptly would be for all our fruit aud hor¬ 
ticultural societies to cut out for a few years all cash 
fruit premiums, and devote the same to some sort of 
consolidated cash prize fund for ideal packages, 
made up from all societies, so that it would he big 
enough really to set some one or more basket and 
box makers into a deep and careful study of the 
package question, such as appears now to be de¬ 
manded by the necessity of more direct and less 
expensive ways of reaching the consumer, and there¬ 
by giving to the producers a larger share of what 
the harvest yields. This is what is going to be need¬ 
ed far more in the future than in the past, and to 
make sure of right methods of the most expert 
salesmanship will require the business brain of each 
end every producer. Better slow up on new pro¬ 
duction ideas and wake up the selling end of our 
business. As business men we have gone on year 
after year manufacturing fruit products with 
mighty little thought as to how we were to turn 
our product into cash, until we had the finished per¬ 
ishable product on our hands, steadily deteriorating 
in value. 
NECESSITY OF NEW METHODS.—Such meth¬ 
ods would bankrupt any other sort of manufacturing 
business, and to avoid this and turn a reasonable 
( Concluded on page 338 1 
WORKING ALFALFA IN SPRING. 
Requirements Involved in the Plan. 
NCERTAIN RESULTS.—The matter of work¬ 
ing Alfalfa in the Spring would need to he 
tested more thoroughly than it has been as 
yet, before anyone could make a very positive state¬ 
ment excepting on certain points. That is to say, it 
looks very nice to cultivate a meadow of Alfalfa, 
conserving moisture thereby, .1 all of us would 
, "In' 
sav right away that theoretically it ought to pay 
to do this, but in actual practice if we cultivated 
the meadow the first thing in 
the Spring, we might possibly 
have plenty of m o i s t u r e 
throughout the Summer, when 
the long tap-roots of this 
plant would not have suffered 
even without the cultivation, 
and in this case the work 
would be thrown away. If 
drought conditions prevailed 
seriously, the ground would 
dry out even in spite of this 
superficial working of the soil 
and we really do not know 
just how much benefit would 
be derived. 
LABOR COXSID E R A- 
T I O N S . — From time to 
time there have been sporadic 
attempts to enthuse farmers 
over the cultivation of these 
meadows, and yet so far none 
of them has been so very 
prominent. A very importanr 
reason for this is probably the 
fact that America is under¬ 
supplied with help of all de¬ 
scriptions, that in the Spring 
few of us are able to do nearly 
all the work that demands to 
be done, that we simply got. 
through the best we can, do¬ 
ing the most important things 
and leaving things that can 
be, to wait until a later time. 
Few of us in the corn belt 
have time even to think of 
cultivating an Alfalfa mea¬ 
dow early in the Spring. The 
days that are given us to pre¬ 
pare soil and sow our crops 
are all too few, and we have 
neither sufficient hands nor 
horses to do one day’s unne¬ 
cessary work, or even work that is not vitally ne¬ 
cessary. Consequently for my own part, I think it 
impractical for many of the corn belt fanners to 
cultivate an Alfalfa meadow early in the Spring. 
Of course if we were small farmers, and especially 
if we had only an acre or so of Alfalfa instead of 
a hundred acres or so, the cultivation of it would 
be a less serious matter. 
DANGER FROM BRUISING.—A number of years 
ago I decided in my own mind that I was unwilling 
to put a disk of any kind on to one of my own Al¬ 
falfa meadows, my reason for this being that 1 
found in a friend’s field unmistakable evidences of 
fungus attacks upon the bruised crowns of Alfalfa 
plants which had been cut by the disk. Some of my 
acquaintances still vise the disk and are enthusiastic 
over it, but I want none of it at all in mine. If I 
use a harrow at. all on my own meadows I use 
the Alfalfa harrow, of which a number are being 
manufactured now, and I use the spring-tooth type 
only. This harrow is now made with diamond points 
only about an inch broad. It digs in much more 
deeply than the old blunt tooth, and in my opinion is 
vastly a superior tool to auythiug else on market 
for this purpose. A blacksmith can convert the old 
blunt-tooth type into the new one by simply rolling 
the upper part of the tooth into a round shank and 
