Now, that is so about the scab fungous disease.  In Illinois, to illustrate, we have what is called the bitter rot fungus in the southern part of the state.  If any one has the bitter rot they are scared to death, they think they are suffering untold misfortune.  The bitter rot attacks the apples when nearly grown.  The ground is covered with the rotted apples, and you can see them in the trees, but this little bit of scab fungus, they do not seem to notice that.

The reason is this, that scab comes from very minute spores that appear upon the apples in May or June, and as the summer advances they spread more and more.  It depends, of course, upon the amount of moisture there is present, but it begins its work when the apples are very small.  If it gets upon the stem of the apple it works around the stem and the apple drops off, and you have apples dropping from the time they are the size of peas until the very last of the fall, and while it looks in the month of June as if you are going to have a good crop of apples when it comes harvest time your crop has diminished greatly or to nothing, and you wonder where it has gone.  With this scab fungus they just keep dropping, dropping, all through the season; whenever you have a little rain or wind these apples that are affected will drop off.  You don’t notice them very much because they go so gradually, one at a time or so, and you don’t notice you are having any particular loss until it comes fall, and you find that your crop is very small.

That is why I say, you should wake up to the fact that it is necessary for you to spray if you are going to have perfect fruit and plenty of it—­and I doubt not you could increase the amount of fruit you have in the State of Minnesota by ten times in one year by simply spraying your orchards thoroughly at the proper time with fungicide.

To do this, as I said, you must have a spraying outfit, individually or collectively, in your neighborhood, and if you get one individually you can take the contract to spray your neighbor’s trees, if you wish, and get back enough to pay you for the outlay.  If you have only a few trees and you have some one who understands it, you could just as well spray a few other orchards in the neighborhood and get your spraying done for nothing in that way, charging them enough to cover the cost and enough for some profit.  That is done in some sections and is a very satisfactory way.

The only way, however, that I would do this, if I were you, would be to enter into a joint arrangement of not less than five years, because if you do it from year to year, if a man has good fruit one year, he may say, “I guess I don’t want to go to that expense this year; I will drop that.”  You know how it is.  If you make a contract for five years then you can make your plans accordingly and get your material and your spraying outfit and everything.  I wouldn’t trust to a one-year plan because they get “cold feet,” as the saying is, after the first year, and perhaps they have not noticed any great advantage and they back out, but if they keep it up five years they wouldn’t be without it.