The Kansas City sun. (Kansas City, Mo.) 1908-1924, 1916-10-28

- made it possible to raise the
temperature of a 200-acre orchard ten to ff-
teen degrees with as much certainty as the
janitor can heat the city mans fiat. 1t takes some
what more labor than the last mentioned process,
but the satisfaction and the profits of heating all
outdoors are surprisingly greater. Frost insur-
ance for the fruit crop is now just as practicable,
Just as certain, and vastly more profitable for the
money expended than either fire or life insurance.
Insurance by fire for the fruit grower makes
vastly greater profits at a much smaller expense
than insurance against fire does for the merchant
or manufacturer. The little outdoor oil stoves and
coal furnaces that have been sold by the millions to
orchard owners in the last yea and a half have
banished from the fruit grower that annual early
spring nervous prostration from fear of frost; that
periodic, paralyzing fear that he may go to bed at
night and awaken to find his whole years labor
chilled to death by a sudden frost. The cumulative
despair of losing three or four fruit crops in sue
cession that has put fruit growers out of business
and made them dependent on charity or day labor
Is past. An orchard with a reasonably industrious
and p%rovident owner can be made to yield an aver
age crop every season so far as the frost is con-
cerned. Scientific frost fighting with fire is as
much a fact as seed testing, irrigation, fertilizing,
spraying or pruning. 1t is the last and greatest
advance in systematic horticulture, and has placed
the fruit grower abreast of the scientific farmer.
Since the beginning of commercial horticulture,
the fruit grower has been at the mercy of the ele-
ments. He made all his calculations, all his plans,
all his business arrangements contingent on the
hope that the frost would miss him. And before
the development of orchard heating the chances
against him were getting worse in the frost belt.
In the modern, commercial orchard, the land, ma
chinery, labor, spraying equipment and cultivation
total as heavy an investment as many manufactur-
ing enterprises. And when two or three crops in
succession were wiped out by frost, the average
grower was completely bankrupt.
Smudging, or the formation of a dense blanket
of smoke over the orchard, had been practiced with
VARYING degrees of success in some parts of Europe.
Orchard heating proper was first used in Califor-
mia, and the original California smudge pot is still
successfully employed in many orchards. In the
spring of 1910 several growers in the Grand valley
of Colorado experimental with the burning of oil
in simple pots of the lard pail" type, with the
result that they saved their entire crop on the heat
ed areas and lost 1t on the unheated tracts. The
spring of 1911 saw the adoption of the smudge pots
on every fruit section of the state, and they
reached the experimental stage in several other
states. In the spring of 1912 there was not a fruit
growing state without them, and many sections
of several states were as fully equipped as Colo
RADIO.
Frost fighting is not an easy job. 1t is neces-
sary to have a force of men, Industrious and care
full and observing to the last degree. And it is no
pleasant task to rush out into the still, cold dark
ness to drudge the better part of the night to save
your own or your neighbor's orchard. In the early
days of orchard heating, a man was detailed to
watch the tested thermometers that were hung In
different parts of the orchard and at the farm
house some distance away from the fruit trees.
If the temperature was not sinking fast, perhaps
the rancher went to bed for a brief nap, setting his
alarm clock to wake him at intervals through the
night. Nowadays he can go to bed with a feeling
of security, leaving the frost alarm thermometer
TO watch for him. This electric Waterman has for
its business end In the orchard q specially made
thermometer, with a fine platinum wire fused into
the mercury at the freezing point or at whatever
is considered the danger point. AS soon as the
' mercury sinks below this wire, the circuit is broken
and the alarm at the head OF the orchard BOSS.
he'd rings out its warning. Any interruption of
the current causes the bell to ring so that If the
apparatus should be put out of order it automat-
ically tells on itself.
But the orchardist is usually forewarned, even
before he goes to bed, and makes ready tor the
srav late in the afternoon he notices great ieecy