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.

“Practically no man can secure adequate drainage without being concerned in the drainage of his neighbor’s land,” said Mr. Peet.  “If the neighbor objects the situation is complicated.  And our drainage laws have been woefully inadequate to handle these problems.”

But recently the farm bureau put it up to a conference of county agents of New York to get the “state leader” to appoint a state committee to work this thing out and persuade the state legislature to make the necessary amendments to the drainage law.  The plan went through, and one of the laws passed compels an objecting property owner to open drains which are necessary for the relief of his neighbors.  This law goes into effect next fall.