Putnam patriot., 1913-08-08
Riches In New England Land
BY GEORGE FRENCH.

BY GEORGE FRENCH.
 When q soil expect from the Depart ment of Agriculture at Washington or one of the several agricultural colleges undertakes to advise farmer as to the crops that will pay him best to raise on his farm he reports to the owner of the land in terms or crops. He tells one man to pull up his peach trees and plant onions. Another he advises to plant peach orchard, or an apple orchard, as where the peach will grow the apple may be raised, and vice versa, with reservation on account of the early or late visitations of frost. He tells another man that his best prospect is hay, and yet another that he should go into the small fruits business. New England is valuable for great variety of crops, but for fruit 1t surpasses any other section Of the country, because it Is composed of the proper chemicals and because the climate is favorable for the tress and the fruit. It is fact that New En- gland raises better apples than other regions, excepting only portion of Pennsylvania, some of Delaware and little section of Virginia. The che mical composition of our hillsides gives us the New England apples that have the best flavor of any apples in the world. The trees live to be n hundred years old, bearing all the time. They grow biz, and produce barrels of fruit to peeks from the trees in the famous fruit sections of the West and Northwest,
 know ltttle farm that has yielded two workers more than = ,100 year profit for many years, The pitiful thing about il k that, so far as know not one of the other farmers in that vicinity has learned the .lesson. They are all waiting for that land to run out. |" IL is better every year. It is | properly fed and properly worked, and 1 it yields crops as certain and staple as the output of any factory. The owners ever try experiments. They have never asked the land to do what il is not fitted to do. They go to market with big two-horse wagon loaded with roots every day in the year. They keep the roots in pits, for the most part. They dc not try to raise any this but roots. They have grown rich of little piece of farm land that was idle when they bought it, for S7o0. Il was an uabandoned farm, and Was abandoned because the owners could not make living oil of it, They did not know how te make the land work for them.
 The more one looks into this matter of the value of the farming lands In New England the more he wonders that there Is an acre of il for sale. Bnt when he finds that he can buy the best of farming land in New England for a third or a quarter what is asked for land no better in the West, he is lost in aniazement. Then he goes on to learn that from New England he can get bigger crops than the Western far mer can get-more corn 10 the acre, more wheat, more potatoes, vastly more fruit and truek-and his amaze ment grows.
 Once l was travelling about New England with a soil expert from the Department of Agriculture at Wash ingten, and after several days looking about, and after the expert had spent several weeks going about in New England, 1 asked him how much more The land under cultivation in New England could be made to yield, without going to the extreme of inten- sive cultivation, and he said, "ren