How To Write Special Feature Articles Part 39

In 1917 Western New York produced the biggest crop of peaches in its history, and in the face of the greatest labor famine. There were nearly 8000 cars of the fruit in danger of spoiling on the trees and on the ground. Peet antic.i.p.ated the crisis by converting the farm bureau into a veritable county labor department. He was promised a good number of high-school boys who were to help in the peach harvest and who were to be cleared through a central office in Buffalo.

Manager Peet worked out arrangements for the care of these boys in forty-two camps strategically located. The camps were to accommodate thirty boys each. The farmers had asked Peet for 4500 hands. He applied for 1500 boys and had every reason to expect these. But at the critical moment something went wrong in Buffalo headquarters and of the 1500 asked for he got only 200!

"I was in Buffalo at the time the news was broken," Manager Peet was saying to me, "and my first impulse was to jump off one of the docks!"

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 a.s.signed 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 pa.s.sed compels an objecting property owner to open drains which are necessary for the relief of his neighbors. This law goes into effect next fall.

Farmers are looking to the farm bureau for help in the cleaning and repairing of some sixty drainage ditches constructed in the past under the county-commissioner plan. But the records on file in the county clerk's office are in bad shape. The farm bureau has taken it upon itself to arrange all this material so that it is available on a minute's notice, and as a result has drawn up pet.i.tions to the supervisors for the cleaning out of three of these ditches.

Cooperating with the New York State Food Commission, the farm bureau had a power-tractor ditcher placed in the county last summer. Peet placed his a.s.sistant in full charge, and the machine never lost a single day as a result of lack of supervision. It has dug over 4000 rods of ditch for tile on twenty-eight farms.

For four years Niagara County farmers had not made expenses in growing tomatoes for the canneries. The farm bureau called a meeting of some fourteen growers and together they figured the cost of production. The average cost for 1917 was found to be $85 an acre; the estimated cost for 1918 was $108 an acre. The average crop was set at six tons to the acre. A joint committee went out of the conference and laid these facts before the canners. The result was that the growers got $20 a ton for their crops in 1918.

These are some outstanding features of the service rendered its farmers by the Niagara bureau. Here are some of its "lesser" activities:

Taking an agricultural census by school districts of each farm in the county and completing the job in one week.

Effecting an interchange of livestock and seed.

Distributing 1000 bushels of seed corn among 383 farmers, twenty-two tons of nitrate of soda at cost among sixty-two farmers, and securing and distributing six tons of sugar to fifty beekeepers for wintering bees.

Indorsing 200 applications for military furloughs.

a.s.sisting in organizing Liberty Loan campaigns, especially the third.

a.s.sisting in the delivery of twenty carloads of feed, fertilizer, farm machinery and barrels, which had been delayed.

Holding twelve demonstration meetings, attended by 602 farmers.

Conducting two tractor schools, attended by 125 farmers.

Arranging eight farmers' inst.i.tutes, attended by 900 farmers.

Organizing a Federal Farm Loan a.s.sociation which has loaned $125,000 to nineteen farmers.

The bureau keeps its members posted on what is going on in the county and what the bureau is doing through the medium of a well-edited monthly "News" of eight pages. The best feature of the handling of this publication is that it costs neither bureau nor members a cent. The advertis.e.m.e.nts from local supply dealers pay for it, and two pages of ads in each issue settles the bill.

The bureau's books show that last year it spent five dollars in serving each member. The membership fee is only one dollar. The difference comes from Federal, state and county appropriations.

The success of this bureau comes from having at the head of it the right man with the right view of what a farm bureau should do. Manager Peet sees to it that the organization works with the local chamber of commerce--the one in Lockport has 700 members--which antedates the farm bureau and which always has supported the bureau. Peet's policy has been to keep the bureau not only before the farmers but before the city people as well.

The "live-wire" committee of the Lockport chamber, composed of lawyers, doctors, bankers, merchants, and the like, has made Manager Peet an _ex-officio_ member. The Niagara Falls and Tonawanda Chambers of Commerce get together with the Lockport chamber and the farm bureau and talk over problems of inter-county importance. These conferences have worked out a unified plan for road development, for instance. The Niagara Farm Bureau helped the Niagara Falls city administration to secure the services of a Federal market inspector. In this way all rivalry between different sections and towns in Niagara County is freed of friction.

About the only criticism I heard against the farm bureau of Niagara County was that Peet was the wrong man. The farmers want a man who will _stay_ manager. But some of the best members hinted that Peet will not stay because he's just a bit too efficient. They seem to fear that some business corporation is going to get him away. And when you look over the record of his work as organizer and executive, you must admit there's something in this.

_(Detroit News)_

Four half-tone ill.u.s.trations: 1. The Settling Basin at the Water Works.

2. Interior of the Tunnel Through which the Water is Pumped.

3. Where Detroit's Water Comes From.

4. Water Rushing into the Settling Basin.

GUARDING A CITY'S WATER SUPPLY

HOW THE CITY CHEMIST WATCHES FOR THE APPEARANCE OF DEADLY BACILLI; WATER MADE PURE BY CHEMICALS

BY HENRY J. RICHMOND

"COLON." The city chemist spoke the one significant word as he set down the test tube into which he had been gazing intently. The next morning the front page of all the city papers displayed the warning, "Citizens should boil the drinking water."

Every morning, as the first task of the day, the city chemist uncorks a curious little crooked tube containing a few spoonsful of very ordinary bouillon, akin to that which you might grab at the quick lunch, but which has been treated by the admixture of a chemical. This tube begins in a bulb which holds the fluid and terminates in an upturned crook sealed at the end. Into this interesting little piece of apparatus, the chemist pours a small quant.i.ty of the city drinking water, and he then puts the whole into an incubator where it is kept at a temperature favorable to the reactions which are expected if the water is contaminated.

After a sufficient time the tube is inspected. To the untrained eye nothing appears. The bouillon still remains in the little bulb apparently unchanged. Its color and clearness have not been affected.

But the chemist notices that it does not stand so high in the closed end of the tube as it did when placed in the incubator. The observation seems trivial, but to the man of science it is significant.

What has happened? The water contained some minute organisms which when acted upon by the chemical in the tube have set up a fermentation.

Gradually, one by one in the little bulb, bubbles of gas have formed and risen to the surface of the liquid in the closed upper end of the tube.

As this gas was liberated, it took the place of the liquid in the tube, and the liquid was forced downward until there was quite a large s.p.a.ce, apparently vacant but really filled with gas.

It was this phenomenon that had attracted the attention of the chemist.

What did it mean? It was the evidence that the water which was being furnished to the city for half a million people to drink contained some living organism.

Now that, in itself, was enough to make an official of the health department begin to take an interest. It was not, however, in itself a danger signal.

Not all bacterial life is a menace to health, the chemist will tell you.

Indeed, humanity has come to live on very peaceable terms with several thousand varieties of bacteria and to be really at enmity with but a score or more. Without the beneficent work of a certain cla.s.s of bacteria the world would not be habitable. This comes about through a very interesting, though rather repulsive condition--the necessity of getting rid of the dead to make room for the living.

What would be the result if no provision had been made for the disintegration of the bodies of all the men and animals that have inhabited the earth since the beginning? Such a situation is inconceivable. But very wisely providence has provided that myriads and myriads of tiny creatures are ever at work breaking up worn-out and dead animal matter and reducing it to its original elements. These elements are taken up by plant life, elaborated into living vegetable growth and made fit again for the nourishment of animal life, thus completing the marvelous cycle. And so we must not get the notion that all bacteria are our mortal foes. We could not live without them, and our earth, without their humble services, would no longer be habitable.

Neither need we fear the presence of bacterial life in our drinking water. Drinking water always contains bacteria. We, ourselves, even when in the best of health, are the hosts of millions upon millions of them, and it is fair to suppose that they serve some useful purpose. At any rate, it has never been demonstrated that they do us any harm under normal conditions.