of
information along various lines in regard to spraying, and I don't decry
science in any sense at all. These men, while they were not
scientifically educated, discovered scientific truths, and it is truths
we want after all.

Just what your position on this spraying proposition is here in
Minnesota, whether you have commercial orchards up here or not, I have
not been able to discover. I presume that your plantings here are very
largely that of the farmer and amateur rather than the commercial
orchardist. In Illinois we have our large commercial orchards, and we
have gotten beyond the question of whether it pays us to spray or not.
For a man to be in the commercial apple business in Illinois and not
spray means that he doesn't accomplish very much and his product doesn't
bring him any profit.

Now, whether you spray commercially or whether you spray for your family
orchard in an amateur way, it doesn't matter so far as the spraying is
concerned--you should spray in either case. If you have a community
where you have few orchards and they are small, it behooves you to get
together and buy a spraying outfit, combine with your neighbors and buy
a good spraying outfit, and then have some man take that matter up who
will do it thoroughly in that neighborhood and pay him for doing it. In
that way, if you hire it done, it doesn't interfere with your farming
operations and gets your spraying done on time. I have noticed this with
stockmen and with grain farmers, men who are not directly interested in
fruit but combine it with their regular business, that they consider
fruit growing a side line and such a small part of their business that
they usually neglect it altogether. In the matter of the spraying they
keep putting it off until tomorrow. When the time arrives for spraying
you must do it _today_ and not put it off until tomorrow.

Time is a very essential element in spraying. To give you an
illustration: A few years ago, in spraying a Willow Twig orchard,
consisting of eighteen rows of trees, I sprayed nine rows of those
trees, or about half of the orchard, we will say, the first part of the
week, the first two days. And then there came on a two or three days'
rain, and the balance of those eighteen rows was sprayed the very last
of the week or the first of the following week. The two following
sprayings went on just at the right time for them, but when it came to
the harvesting of that crop the trees that were sprayed