FRUIT FARMING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA. [To TNT EDITOR OP TEE
"SPECTATOR."1 SIB,—In the interest of intending fruit farming settlers from England, permit me to contradict one or two misleading state- ments, made doubtless in all good faith, by Mr. Deane in his letter in your issue of May 13th.
(1) It is the irrigated and not, as Mr. Deane states, the non- irrigated fruit which is distinguished for its superior keeping qualities. This is a fact well known to the wholesale dealer, as it is to the scientific horticultural expert. On this point I refer you to Professors Paddock and Whipple, of the Colorado State Experimental Station, and to Professors Thornber and Thatcher, of the Washington State Horticultural Experi- mental Station and College at Pullman, U.S.A. Hence the higher prices obtained for first-grade irrigated fruit, and hence also the fact that at the great Canadian Apple Show at Vancouver last November 95 per cent. of the prizes and awards went to irrigated fruit.
(2) Apple trees grown under irrigation on the B.O. dry belt come into bearing in the fifth year. Indeed, at Kelowna I have photographed four-year-old trees so weighted with fruit that they had to be supported by stakes. Mr. Deane is probably right as to eight years being required to reach bearing point if he refers to trees grown in the non-irrigation districts of the wet belt. Space forbids my giving the horti- cultural reasons for this difference, but they are well known to every scientific horticultural expert in America.
But irrigation fruit farming necessitates a respectable land development company with extensive capital at its back to furnish an adequate irrigation system approved by Government before an inch of orchard plot can be disposed of. I instance Lord Aberdeen's famous Coldstream Estate Company at Vernon and Mr. W. T. Stirling's K.L.O. Company at Kelowna. These are unwelcome facts to the "land shark " and disreputable " real estate " man, who like to be able to acquire a block of cheap land in a district of the wet belt where they are not called upon to expend capital on the provision of any irrigation system before they can cut up and sell off the land as fruit farms to green Englishmen.
Part of the stock-in-trade of these gentry is the wide circu- lation of the false statement as to the superior keeping quality of non-irrigated fruit, &e., which Mr. Deane innocently repeats, and which I am endeavouring to correct.
Finally, irrigation fruit farming has not been "boomed" into British Columbia, as Mr. Deane appears to suggest, but was introduced from "the States," where the apple-growing industry during the past fifteen years has been concentrating itself in the irrigation districts of Washington and Oregon, and where the non-irrigation orchards are gradually going out of cultivation on account of the admitted market superiority of irrigated fruit.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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