NURSERIES.
The special development of nursery agriculture is recent. Nurseries were in existence in North America a hundred years and more ago, but they were isolated, relatively unimportant, and few in number. In 1900 there were 2,029 nursery farms (establishments in which nursery stock constitutes at least 40 per cent of the products) in the United States, comprising 165,780 acres ; and in 1901 there were 1,561 acres devoted to nurseries in Canada. The nursery business is understood in this country to he devoted to the raising for sale of woody plants and perennial herbs, and does not include the raising of florists' plants and vege tables, although an establishment or place in which any plant is reared for sale or transplanting is properly a nursery. Aside from the commercial nurseries, there are city park departments, ceme teries, florist establishments and private estates that rear vast quantities of plants.
The total value of the commercial nursery prod ucts in the last census year (1899) in the United States was $10,086,136. The states returning a product of more than a half million dollars are: New York, 237 establishments, $1,703,354; Iowa, 104 establishments, $636,543; Illinois, 126 estab lishments, $610,971 ; Ohio, 147 establishments, $538,534; California, 141 establishments, $533,038; Pennsylvania, 95 establishments, $515,010. The average size of the nursery farms was 81.7 acres, and the average value per acre of the land was $84. In Canada, by far the larger part of the nurseries are in the province of Ontario. From the other provinces the acreage is returned as follows: Quebec, 193; Manitoba, 90; British Columbia, 72; Nova Scotia, 37 ; New Brunswick, 35 ; Prince Edward Island, 17; The Territories, 20.
As a type of farm organization and management, the nursery business has received no careful study in this country. It differs from all other forms of agriculture in many of its fundamental features, particularly in its business organization. A high grade nursery presents perhaps the most perfect division into departments of any agricultural busi ness; to illustrate this feature, a rather full dis cussion of an organization for a $50,000 nursery business is presented in the following pages.
Inasmuch as nursery farming is not the raising of a single crop, or even a single series of crops, and as the various nursery crops are treated in the Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, the crop practice phases are not discussed here. The nursery
business is characterized by the relatively small equipment in machinery, and the great outlay for labor. In 1899, the labor outlay in the nurseries enumerated in the census was considerably more than one-fifth of the total value of the products. On the other hand, the outlay for implements was only 5 per cent of the products, and for fertilizers it is surprisingly small, being only $139,512 as against $2,305,270 for labor. This low fertilizer cost is the result of the custom of growing trees on land that has not been "treed," especially fruit-stock, which must attain a certain size and appearance at a specified time. There has been much speculation as to the reason why trees do not succeed well after trees ; but this should be no more inexplicable than similar experience with other crops. Rotation is no doubt as necessary in nurseries as in other kinds of farming. No rotation systems have been worked out, however, and nursery production is to that de gree not conducted on a scientific basis. Great atten tion has been given to developing skill in propagating the plants and in tilling and handling the stock, but little is known of the underlying soil and fer tility requirements. Experiments have demonstrated (see Roberts and Bailey, for example, in Cornell bul letins) that the failure of trees to succeed trees with good results is not due to lack of plant-food alone.
Although certain kinds of nursery farming may be classed with the intensive agricultural industries, as a whole the average returns per acre are not remarkably large for a special i dustry. The cen sus shows the average value per acre of the prod uct not fed to live-stock (comprising by far the greater part of the total product) to have been $60.84 for the whole United States, being about six times the acreage value for all crops. The average value from flower and plant farms, however, was $431.83. The distribution of the property in nur sery-farms is mostly in land and its improvements exclusive of buildings, this item being for the United States $6,841, in a total average valuation of $9,436 per farm. In buildings there were invested $2,101 to each farm, in implements $266, and in live-stock $228. Each nursery farm averaged $4,971 in the value of its product.