Several days ago, I talked with one of these feeders who has time and again topped the Chicago market.  He made the remark that the buildings on his farm cost thousands of dollars while his evergreen grove had only cost from $100 to $200, but that he would rather have every building on the place destroyed than to lose that windbreak.

As the price of land and feed increases, the farmers of the Northwest are waking up to the fact that an evergreen grove is an absolute necessity, and that they cannot afford to plant any other.  The maple, willow, box elder and other similar trees take so much land that they cannot afford them.  They are a windbreak in the summer, but a joke in the winter.

The time is not far distant when every up-to-date farmer in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and other Northwest states will have a good evergreen grove which will be considered as much of a necessity as his barn, house or other outbuildings.

[Illustration:  Evergreens adorn old home of Otto Kankel, at Fertile, Minn., in Red River Valley.]

Late this fall, my wife and I left Hampton for an automobile trip through Minnesota, North Dakota and into Canada.  It seemed to me on this trip that the most beautiful thing we saw about the farm buildings were the evergreen groves that many of the farmers now have all through Minnesota and Dakota.  I was certainly very much surprised at some of these windbreaks and at some of the varieties of evergreens that were being grown successfully as far north as Fargo.  Near Fargo we found some extra good specimens of Norway spruce, which I consider the best of all windbreak makers.  We also found the Scotch pine doing well 100 miles northwest of Fargo, and other varieties which were naturally to be expected being planted to a considerable extent.

As far as usefulness is concerned, the farmer of the prairie states is bound to get more real value from an evergreen than any other person, but I am very glad to say that the homes of the wealthy in the cities each season are being improved more and more by the planting of the more ornamental evergreens.  Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and other large cities of the United States are using thousands of evergreens every season to beautify the homes, of not only the wealthy but of the laboring man also.  The price of evergreens at the present time is within the reach of everyone owning a home, and there is no other improvement that can be placed upon a piece of ground at so little expense and so little labor that will add so many dollars in real value to that property as will the evergreen, either as a windbreak or in landscape work.

Annual Report, 1915, Executive Board.

J. M. UNDERWOOD, CHAIRMAN