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.

Yet there are things about the county which no statistics will ever show, such things, for instance, as the condition of the orchards, the market value of the fruit, the earning capacity of the land as a whole—­in other words, the bedrock rating of the county.  You have to get at these things by a different avenue of approach.

A rather close auditing during 1914 of the accounts of some eighty-seven typical good farms in perhaps the best section of Niagara County brought out the fact that labor incomes from these farms, on the whole, could not be classed as strictly giltedge.  One diagnosis made by a Niagara County investigator is recorded in these words: 

“Though Niagara County has many of the best fruit farms in New York State, there are numbers of orchards that have been abandoned to the ravages of insects and disease.  There is also a tendency toward extensive rather than intensive fruit growing, which has resulted in many large plantings being made.

“Niagara County does not need more orchards, but rather cultivation and spraying of the present orchards; it does not need to produce more fruit, but rather to insure better grading and marketing of the present production.”

This observation is dated 1914, one year after leading farmers and business men of the county, convinced that all was not so well with them as the lifeless census figures would have one believe, made the move to set up and operate for the county a farm bureau.  New York is the national hotbed of farm-bureau enthusiasm and propaganda.

Almost six years to the day after the inauguration of this bureau, I went into Niagara County.  And before I left I was able to sketch a rather vivid mental picture of what a farm bureau really can do for a county, be the raw material with which it must work good, bad or indifferent.

Up in the office of the Niagara County Farm Bureau at Lockport I waited some two hours for an interview with its manager, Nelson R. Peet.  That wait was an eye-opener.

Three women clerks and stenographers and the assistant manager occupied this room.  The clerks were trying to typewrite, answer the continuous ringing of the phone, respond to buzzer summons from Manager Peet’s private office and talk with a stream of visitors, all at the same time.