The farm-labor shortage which antedated our entrance into the war became a national menace about the time our selective draft began to operate. New York farmers were as hard hit as any other farmers, particularly in the fruit sections, where a tremendous labor supply falls suddenly due at harvest time. Niagara County came in for its full share of this trouble and the Niagara County Farm Bureau went its length to meet the emergency.
In 1917 Western New York produced the biggest crop of peaches in its history, and in the face of the greatest labor famine. There were nearly 8000 cars of the fruit in danger of spoiling on the trees and on the ground. Peet anticipated the crisis by converting the farm bureau into a veritable county labor department. He was promised a good number of high-school boys who were to help in the peach harvest and who were to be cleared through a central office in Buffalo.
Manager Peet worked out arrangements for the care of these boys in forty-two camps strategically located. The camps were to accommodate thirty boys each. The farmers had asked Peet for 4500 hands. He applied for 1500 boys and had every reason to expect these. But at the critical moment something went wrong in Buffalo headquarters and of the 1500 asked for he got only 200!
"I was in Buffalo at the time the news was broken," Manager Peet was saying to me, "and my first impulse was to jump off one of the docks!"
Here was a nice kettle of fish! The fruit was ripening on the trees, and the phones in the bureau offices were ringing their plating off with calls from frantic farmers. Peet didn't jump off a Buffalo dock; he jumped out of his coat and into the fray. He got a Federal Department of Labor man to help him. They plastered appeals for help all over Western New York—on the walls of post offices, railroad stations, on boarding houses. They worked on long-distance phones, the telegraph, the mails. They hired trucks and brought city men and boys and women and girls from cities to work in the orchards over week-ends. Labor, attracted by the flaring posters, drifted into the bureau's offices in Lockport and immediately was assigned to farms; and hundreds of laborers whom Peet never saw also came.
By working seven days a week and often without meals and with cat naps for sleep the bureau cleared 1200 laborers through its office, to say nothing of the loads brought overland by motor truck and which never came near the office. Business houses in the towns closed down and sent their help to the orchards. Lockport's organization of "live wires"—lawyers, doctors, bankers—went out and worked in the orchards.
"Well," was Peet's comment, "we saved the crop, that's all!"
Last year the bureau placed 1095 men and four women on farms in Niagara County. In addition, 1527 soldiers were secured on two-day furloughs from Fort Niagara to help harvest the fruit crops. "We did this," said Manager Peet, "mainly by starting early and keeping persistently at it with the War Department, in order to cut the red tape."
This fall there will go into effect in New York State an amendment to its drainage law which is going to do more properly to drain the state than all the steam diggers that could have been crowded on its acres under former conditions. This action came out of Niagara County, through the farm bureau.
To realize the importance of drainage in this county one must remember that it lies in two levels broken by the ridge which forms the locks at Lockport, the falls at Niagara Falls, and which extends across the county from east to west. In each plateau the land is very level, there being but few places in the county having a difference in elevation of twenty feet within a radius of a mile. Good drainage is very necessary and in the past has been very hard to secure.