Norwich bulletin., 1914-11-21
THE BOOMING CROPS OF THE: YEAR 1914


 that would have been three times as much as I~can get for them at the farm. In fact, can't sell them at all to anybody except the cider mill, which offers me 25 cents hundred weight for thena--but 1 don't have to furnish any barrels!
 Another friend in another city writes that she is having to pay 80 cents a peck for cooking apples, That's at the rate of $1.20 a bushel, or about $3.S0 a barrel.
 and eaters price, eh?
 As 1 said at the outset, it's mighty pleasan to know that farmers some where are. getting the persimmons without having to knock them off the trees.
 On the other hand 1t seems just a. bit queer that this year, like almost all the other past years I can recall, it is the farmers somewhere else-noI you and I and our neighbors-who arc feeding so fatly and getting so rich.
 Doesn't it seem a little too bad that all the automobiles and silver plated bath room fixtures should go out to Kansas and Iowa farmers, when there are so many of us Tanks who would enjoy them. too?
 When we were boys we were all told about the pot of gold that lay at the could Cnce geU to where that bow touched the ground. Perhaps some of you tried after it. as the boy I once was did. But we never could catch up with that rainbow. As we advanc- ed, it receded. After wet and weary struggling through the soaked grass it was always just as far away from Us as when we started
 Do you really suppose there's any basis for the horrible suspicion which sometimes crosses my skeptical nina that the rainbow of agriculturay pros perity is as elusive as the 'prismatic arch of clearing summer skies?
 There's one thing paIpabIy self evident about this years prosperity figures they mostly apply to wheat and corn farmers. And they serve to reinforce the arguments I've repeatedly made for 9 greater diversifcation of our New England farming. If some of us haG had more corn and more wheat this year and fewer apples and potatoes we should have been better off.
 Of course, we can't raise much corn or wheat in Connecticut. But there are a good many farms-a good many more than some farmers think which will grow corn and wheat which will grow bunkum. corn and fine wheat
 Recall those figures 1 quoted a month ago-how the station had been for three years experimenting with wheat and growing from 23 to 35 bushels per acre; how ex-Governor Woodruff had raised 40 bushels an acre on eight acres? And the average acre yield for the whole country, even this booming year, is reported by the department to be only 16.7 bushels!
 And did you read about ii years old Mason H. Parker's half-acre of corn, in "The Wide Awake Circle" the other day? He narrowed the half acre five times with a yoke of three year old steers; put two bags of fer tilizer on it (manure had previously been piowed under); planted it three feet apart one way and 14 inches the times" holding the cUltivator while his little sister rode the horse; cut the corn mornings and evenings be- fore and after school; esnt ten ears to Hartford fair and got first prize of seven dollars; 'husked it all alone and got just 80 bushels.''
 It begins to look as if a whole lot of LIS gray-haired old fellows would do better to retire and let the tweIve-year- olds do our work! They seem to "git thar when we don't.
 
 But there: may be hope, even yet, for us moss-baeks. In The Bulletins re- cent report of Corn night at the Norwich grange there were some things which seem to indicate that a new spirit is beginning to manifest itself To begin with, there we're 28 entries, more than three times as many as in the competition year ago." It seems there were cnly eight entries in 1913
 M"rcoVer, there was marked i'm provement noted in the quality of corn over that displayed a. year ago.
 Three times as many farmers inter- ested in corn. and those interested proving that they had done better work with It. Such things are worth re- cording, not, perhaps, as eminent re- suits but as mighty satisfactory indi- cations of a changing spirit.
 When eggs are high big basket of eggs is a very good thing. Even then, though, the wisdom of our ancestors