Excerpt from 38th Annual Report of the State Horticultural Society of Missouri: Meetings at Willow Springs, June 4, 5, 6, and Neosho, December 3, 4, 5, 1895 We are often asked what is the best crop to grow in an orchard, and I think the very best answer we can give, is apples. There is but one thing that may be profitably planted in an orchard after it has come to a bearing age, and that is stock peas, and it remains to be tested wheter they will be profitable anywhere in the State except in the red lands, but they have been fairly well tried here in the Ozarks, and are proving a great success. They may be drilled in and cultivated, or sown broadcast and turned under or cut for hay at the proper time, or be allowed to mature and be picked for seed and other purposes, or fed down to hogs, and in any case the land seems to have been equally benefitted and more elements of fertility restored to it than could be obtained from clover or any other crop in the same time or with any fertilizer at the same cost. The mechanical action of the roots seems to have the power to make the land lively and fertile. We are often asked, will not this business of fruit growing be overdone!i We answer emphatically no. There are so many thousand of these trees that have been and are being planted that will never come to a profitable bearing age, and so many who have planted trees and cared for them for a few years will become discouraged and say, I can't afiord to cultivate and prune and spray and look for borers and all these things. I have planted the trees and tended to them till they are old enough to bear, and I can't do any more. This class of fruit-growers will never glut the markets of the world with good fruit, but they will tend to keep up the nurseries and give the progressive orchardist an Open market for all his products. When I was a boy and my father was planting trees in Jackson county, some people said the business would be overdone in a short time, and he would have to cut his trees down. From that time to the present the market for our orchard pro ducts has gradually grown better and larger, and now it is easier to sell a thousand barrels than it was then to sell a bushel. There is an old but quite true saying that no one is so far from market as he who has nothing to sell. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.