FIGHTING THE FROST BY USING COAL ORCHARD HEATERS Niagara and Michigan and Nova Scotia sell at from $100 to $200? "Boom and "boost may have something to do with it; but "boom and "boost" are not all. The rock bottom basis of values is interest on investment; and your man who gets $7500 from an investment of $12,000 has a right to a feeling of confidence in the methods used. An almost similar story could be told of the sugarbeet growers in Utah and Montana, of the citrus growers of California and Arizona, of the potato and onion farmers in the Dakotas and Idaho and Montana. Water they must must have soil for any kind of farming at all; but the factor making for success more than water or soil,-which the Easterners might have as well as the Westerner, the factor making for success is, as the apple grower said, the vigilance of the new methods. What were the sage-brush lands worth before the new methods came? From $3.50 to $10 an acre without the water; from $75 to $150 when the irrigation ditch came; from $150 to $1000 when put under fruit. Some fruit areas have sold as high as $4000, and in California under orange culture as high as $7000; but the high values are owing to exceptional circumstances, a city going up on the edge of the farm, or a multimillionaire putting up a marble palace next door. daily with the prices. We don't pay these have for irrigation farming; just as they fellows paltry commissions. They are from among ourselves, and we give them as high as $5000 year. We have a man in Germany and France looking over the markets and methods there. Our association supplies the boxes and paper for packing and sees that everything goes out uniform and graded. At the station warehouses here, every apple, every peach, is examined as it is packed; and not a cull is allowed to pass. Apples flawed in the skin, bruised, specked, all are rejected and sent back to the shipper. What is the result? Our apples go right on the market in New York and London and Paris and command exactly as much for our small boxes,-one-fourth of a barrel,-as you pay for a barrel of other apples. They command that price because they are perfect in appearance and will keep. You pay in New York from $2 to $2.50 a box for our apples; and you can get a barrel of your Eastern apples for $1.75 to $2.50; but by the time you have used two layers off the top of that barrel the size begins to diminish, and the apples in the bottom have begun to rot before you reach them. Oh, yes, I know your Nova Scotia and Niagara and Michigan man boasts he can beat us out as to flavor; but we can beat him right off his own market at his own game, while we are 2000 miles away. And who can say that the Colorado man is not speaking the truth? Why do the Colorado and Oregon and Washington and California and Utah fruit lands sell at from $500 to $1000 an acre, when the fruit lands of DANGERS IN IRRIGATING Of course the picture has its reverse side; and it is only fair to the investor to give that reverse side. We were motoring through the Government project in Montana. "That fellow," said the engineer, pointing to a farm unit of some forty acres, "made $1500 from his watermelons last year; but this year he turned water on, two or three times too often. The growth all went to size,-didn't ripen,-frost caught him; and he'll close this season in debt." Almost next door to the man who turned the water on too often, was a pickle farm. The man had put in only some eight or ten acres in pickle vegetables,cucumbers, onions, tomatoes,-just as much as he could care for without hiring help. Then he bought a little gasoline engine for motor and boiler power and manufactured and barreled his own pickles right on the spot. Last year's pickle farming cleared him over $5000, with less labor and expense than the Colorado man had spent on his orchard. At another time we were driving along the high line ditch of a Government canal. Back and above the ditch lay thousands of acres of high mesas, sage-brush plateaus, rich in silt but destitute of water. "That," said the engineer, pointing with his whip, "is where the wild-catters' operate. That land is being sold to Eastern tenderfeet as irrigated land at irrigated prices. You would think people should realize that water will not run up hill. Buyers could save themselves that loss if they wrote for information to the Government engineers as to whether the land is above or below ditch line." What are the lessons of irrigation farming to the East? It is eleven years since I left the West to reside permanently in the East; The and in those eleven years there have been at least four years when drought seriously affected farm values in the East. Yet the East has never thought of irrigation except for truck-gardens and green-houses. East has plowed along in the same old furrow it was plowing in 1700. To construct water reservoirs for the East would be a joke compared to what is being done in the West; for water is always plentiful at some time of the year in the East; and the contour of hills lends to natural reservoirs. Even without irrigation storage one is constrained to ask, what would be the result if the East, right at the door of its markets, adopted the irrigation farmers' methods. Long ago the East gave of its manhood and its means for the winning of the West. The day may be at hand when the West, youthful and buoyant and perhaps even bumptious, will bring back some return for that old obligation to the East. The West has been reclaimed. Isn't it time for somebody to launch the evangel of reclaiming the East? AN APPLE ORCHARD NEAR GRAND JUNCTION, COLORADO, THE GRAND VALLEY PROJECT (A standard of cultivation unknown in Eastern orchards) THE ADVANCE OF FORESTRY IN THE UNITED STATES BY HENRY S. GRAVES (United States Forester) THE 'HE fundamental problem of forestry is the unreserved public lands 15 billion, and how to make use of forests permanent- the national parks 10 billion. There is also ly. It is a matter of historic record that about 200 million board feet on various wherever this problem has been solved it has military reservations. been largely through the work of the Government. The United States will not be an exception to this rule. This country has just awakened to the need of the conservation of its forests and other natural resources. Public interest has been thoroughly aroused, and there is now a widespread demand that the destruction of forests by fire and other agencies be stopped, and that when timber is cut not only the interests of the present but also those of the future shall be considered. During the last decade great progress has been made in the application of forestry. This is shown in a more conservative management of forests privately owned as well as in the handling of Government forests and the establishment of State forests. The remarkable development of the idea of for est conservation and the practical achievements in the application of forestry already secured are largely the results of the work of the Forest Service under the leadership of Gifford Pinchot. The work of the federal Government on behalf of forestry falls under three quite distinct heads, the management of forests on its own holdings, the promotion of the practice of forestry by States and private owners through advice and the education of public pinion, and the conduct of scientific investigations necessary to the successful practice of forestry everywhere. NATIONAL FOREST ADMINISTRATION In the first place, about one-fifth of the standing timber of the country is in the hands of the Government. Probably nine-tenths, or something like 400 billion board feet, of this Government-owned timber has been included in the national forests. The various Indian reservations are estimated to have in the neighborhood of 35 billion board feet, Down to 1905 custody of the national forests was given by Congress to the Department of the Interior. The Department of Agriculture, with its staff of trained foresters, merely gave advice to the Interior Department, just as it now does to private owners, States, and other branches of the federal Government desirous of assistance in applying technical forestry. On a number of military reservations forestry is being practiced by the War Department with the assistance of the Forest Service, which supervises the actual work. The Office of Indian Affairs now supervises its own work on the timbered parts of Indian reservations. On the unreserved public lands of the United States no attempt is made to apply forestry, because these lands are subject to the general land law policy, under which the Government merely holds them unless they are taken by private individuals under various laws. If found better suited to forest purposes than to other use they would naturally be added to the present national forest area, and are being so added except in the States of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado, where Congress has forbidden the increase of the national forest area except by legislative enactment. In all other States the President has power to set aside forests from the public lands. Since February 1, 1905, the administration of the national forests has been under the Forest Service. The national forests contain a gross area of nearly 195,000,000 acres. Within them, however, are over 22,000,000 acres of alienated lands. The actual holdings of the Government in the national forests are therefore about 172,000,000 acres. The purpose of the administration of this great area, which includes forests in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, and Arkansas, as well as in all the fullest permanent usefulness to the wealthproducing activities of the country. This usefulness is found not only in the production of timber and other products derived from trees, but also in their production of forage for stock and in their control of water supply. States west of the Plains, is to promote their from top to bottom are either scarred with old burns or entirely bare of timber because fires' started by lightning have burned until checked by natural causes. Until means of communication are developed and until forest management can be applied through sales of timber which should make way for a new growth, inferior forest conditions are inevitable. Inferior conditions mean not only a partial loss of the productive power of the land for timber supply but also less efficient water conservation. PROTECTION SECURED THROUGH USE Although the first duty of the Forest Service administration is to protect these forests as productive resources, accomplishment of this end requires that main emphasis should be laid on the promotion of their use. Practically, they can be protected in no other way than through promoting use. To try to lock them up from present use for the sake of the future would be to attempt the impossible. It is not merely a question of cost. Not only would the policing against depredations and the prevention of forest fires in an unoccupied and empty forest wilderness of such vast extent necessitate an enormous drain upon the people; without use the resources of the forests could not be made fully available for the next generation. Use is the tool by which the Forest Service cares for these resources. The same thing has been proved true in the older countries, where forestry has had a chance to do its best work. The greater the population and the more highly developed the industrial state of the region in which a productive forest is maintained, the more completely is the forest resource protected and developed. WORK OF THE SUPERVISORS AND RANGERS The work of applying forestry, and of learning how to apply it better, is in the hands of the staff of technical foresters in the Government employ. The higher officers of this staff have their headquarters in Washington and at six district offices, located at central points in the West; but as technically trained men become available the individual forests also are put in their charge. Their position is then that of forest supervisor. On the ground, the actual work of the Government and the transaction of business with the public which use of the forests involves is mainly in the hands of the forest supervisors and forest rangers. These men comprise the greater part of the field force. There are 147 national forests, with an average size of over a million acres, each in charge of a supervisor or deputy supervisor. Though the supervisor spends a large part of his time in the field, a great deal of the business connected with the administration of his forest is necessarily office business, and his headquarters must be in a town and not in the woods. Much of the minor business of the forest is handled in the first instance by the rangers, and the execution of all classes of work is chiefly in their hands. The ordinary man is apt to think of a virgin forest as superior in quality to anything which the forester can produce artificially. It is true that under favorable conditions the veteran growth of a primeval forest reaches dimensions more majestic than will be found in a forest grown for profit; but this is because to Nature time does not count for any- For example: A sale of a million feet of thing. On the other hand, a natural forest national forest timber is made to a lumberis exposed to dangers which it is the busi- man. The actual sale of over $100 worth ness of the forester to guard against. Those of timber must, as a rule, be submitted by the who have traveled in the West will have a supervisor for the approval of one of the six vivid realization of the extent to which the district foresters; but the supervisor ordinarnatural forest has been ravaged by destruc- ily recommends the sale before it is made. tive agencies. Fires, windstorms, insect By the terms of the contract of sale the purpests, and tree diseases have all contributed chaser is required to take only such timber, to forest depletion on an enormous scale. In and all such timber, as the Forest Service most parts of the world fire follows man; may designate for removal from the sale area, but in the West lightning has always been and must follow such regulations as are neca cause of fires, which dry climatic conditions essary to prevent fire and injury to young make highly dangerous. Countless moun- growth and provide for the future welfare tain sides which should be evenly wooded of the forest. The actual execution of the |