The peaches of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

Peach-growing is a game of chance from start to finish; advantages and disadvantages in location are exceedingly changeable; risks to tree and crop attendant on weather are many; the trees are beset on all sides by diseases and parasites for two of which in New York, yellows and little-peach, there is no preventive, antidote nor alleviation; transportation is perilous, competition keen, and markets fitful. Add variability in investment and the difficulties in calculating profits in peach-growing are apparent. On the other hand, keeping accounts in peach-growing is not as difficult and complicated as in growing other fruits. The peach is not as long-lived, barring accidents the trees bear more regularly, the crop is quickly disposed of, orchard-operations among growers are more uniform, and, no doubt, the very fact that the peach partakes so much of speculation makes growers a little keener on striking balances at the end of the season. At any rate there is a great body of material in the reports of the horticultural societies in New York on costs in peach-growing and from these data, together with notes taken for several years, we venture to estimate the present costs per acre of the several items entering into peach-production. To attempt to go further and calculate profits, with all of the inconstant factors of yields and markets, would be guessing pure and simple.

Let us consider the cost of production in a ten-acre orchard. This unit is now, however, rather too small, for more and more growers are giving up general farming, finding peach-growing an exacting, full-time vocation. Often enough it is successfully combined with the growing of other fruits, but less and less so with the growing of farm-crops. The first item in cost of production is interest on investment. What value is to be placed on a New York peach-orchard?

The value must be calculated from the cost of land and trees and the labor and the deferred dividends until the orchard comes into profitable bearing. Selling price is never a safe gauge with the peach, sales usually being made under conditions more abnormal than in almost any other phase of farming and showing great variability in every locality. Suppose we place the value at $400 per acre, a sum sufficiently high to cover, besides the cost of the orchard, the overhead expenses of houses and barns that would fall to ten acres of a New York farm. Interest now runs at five percentum so that the first expense item is $20.00 per acre on investment. Assessment rates on land so valued would bring taxes up to $1.00 per acre.

The equipment needed to care for a peach-orchard is quite uniform the State over and the cost of the several items varies scarcely at all, so that a very close approximation may be made of the total cost. The items run about as follows: Team and harness at present price, $500; spraying outfit, $250; wagon, plow, harrow, ladders, crates, pruning tools, etc., $250; total, $1,000. These figures are below the mark rather than above but the instances are few in which the equipment itemized would be used exclusively for a ten-acre peach-orchard; in fact, with this equipment thirty acres could be cared for. It is not total cost, however, but depreciation and interest on money with which we are concerned. Setting these at 20 percentum, we have $20.00 per acre to charge to maintenance of equipment.

Year in and year out, tillage is the most costly ingredient in the making of a good peach-orchard. It consists of plowing once a year, fall or spring, and harrowing on the average at least ten times a season. High cost of labor brings this item up to $10.00 per acre which includes seeding the cover-crop but not the cost of seed, for which an additional charge of $2.50 must be made for a combination crop of red clover and oats or of vetch and barley.

It would seem easiest of all to ascertain the cost of fertilizers for the peach but the practices are so diverse and fertilizers are applied so irregularly by those who use them at all that the data at hand are almost worthless. Those who plow under cover-crops regularly, spend little for fertilizers; an occasional dressing of stable manure answers for fertilization with many; still more, so uncertain of results as to feel they are "buying a pig in the poke," spend nothing for fertilizers. We shall enter a charge of $5.00 per acre for fertilizers though this is without question above the average even if only successful orchards be considered.

A more certain charge is that for pruning. The problems in pruning are more of the mind than the hand and once the work is laid out it goes along rapidly. An acre-average of $3.00 is sufficient to cover the expense of pruning and thinning may be done, year in and year out, at the same cost.

The peach-orchard is customarily sprayed but once in New York, an application of the lime-sulphur wash being made to prevent leaf-curl and to destroy San Jose scale. The cost of this single spray cannot be more than $4.00 per acre but to this must be added a charge for protection against mice and rabbits, destruction of borers and cutting out trees infected with yellows or little-peach, averaging, all told, at least $8.00 for keeping under pests.

The services of a peach-grower are worth more than the time of the men who do the actual labor. It is but fair, then, that an allowance be made for superintending the work. Since a competent orchardist can superintend a farm enterprise of several times the magnitude of a ten-acre orchard, but part can be allowed for superintendence, $300 for the season being a fair price, or $30.00 per acre.

Picking, grading, packing and hauling are all operations that cost no two men the same for any one. Without attempting to segregate these items an approximation of the total cost of all, based on a considerable amount of data, is $30.00 per acre. This sum does not include the cost of packages.