- 1. "A Traction Ditcher at Work Digging Trench for Tile."
- 2. "Ditch Dug With Dynamite Through Woods."
- 3. "Apple Packing House and Cold Storage at Ransomville."
- 4. "Nelson R. Peet, County Agent and Manager of the Niagara County Farm Bureau, New York."
- 5. "Part of the Crowd Listening to the Speakers."
Where New York Farmers Get Help in Their Fruit Growing and Marketing Problems
BY D. H. WILLIAMS
You've got to look into the family closet of a county and study its skeletons before you can decide whether that county's farming business is mostly on paper or on concrete. You've got to know whether it standardizes production and marketing, or just markets by as many methods as there are producers.
As a living example of the possibility of tightening up and retiming the gears of a county's economic machinery to the end of cutting out power losses, Niagara County, New York, stands in a distinct class by itself.
Here is an area of 558 square miles, with Lake Ontario spraying its northern line. A network of electric and steam railways and hundreds of miles of splendid state highways make up a system of economic arteries through which the industrial life-blood of the county circulates.
Forty-eight hours to Chicago's markets, the same distance to New York's; three wealthy industrial and agricultural cities within the county itself—Lockport, Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda—operating with a wealth of cheap electric power generated at Niagara Falls—these are some of the advantages within and without the county, the value of which is self-evident.
Beginning with the southern plain section, Niagara's agriculture changes in type from general hay and grain farming to a more intense fruit-growing industry as the northern plain section is approached, until within the zone of Lake Ontario's tempering influence the fruit industry almost excludes all other types of farming.
There is hardly a more favored fruit section in the country than the northern half of Niagara County. Apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, cherries, quinces make up the county's horticultural catalogue. The latest available figures rank Niagara County first among the counties of New York in the number of fruit trees; second in the total number of bushels of fruit produced; first in the quantity of peaches, pears, plums and prunes, quinces and cherries; third in the number of bushels of apples.