1928] THE AGRICULTURAL SITUATION IN CALIFORNIA 27 
will individual enterprise. No cooperative association is perfeet, all of 
them make mistakes; but the principle of cooperative marketing is one 
that should be encouraged everywhere. The farmers of California 
should back it. 
In many places our farming is too specialized; we grow one crop 
on a farm. The grower gets along all right so long as that crop brings 
a high price, but when the price goes down, as it always does in the 
course of time, that man has to tide over a mumber of lean years 
because he has no other crop. If he has saved his profits during the 
good years so as to tide him over the lean years, he may successfully 
survive. 
All crops fluctuate in value. No crop brings a high price over a 
long term of years. No matter what crop you choose you are bound 
to find a price depression some time during your lifetime. One of the 
ways to help solve your farming problem may be to quit putting all 
your eggs in one basket; have more than one string to your bow 
Prices do not all go up and down together. It is true that the deeidu- 
ous fruit crops usually fluctuate more or léss together, but livestock 
products are often up when fruit products are down. The man who 
has both fruit and livestock may be able to tide himself over a period 
of low prices in one or the other without so much reserve money in the 
bank to draw upon. Diversified farming then is one of the ways to 
make safe farming. 
The difficulty is people often don’t like diversified farming. The 
previous section has stated that diversified farming helps to use your 
time profitably throughout the whole year. Some people don’t want 
to be busy the year around, they’d rather have one crop and more 
leisure. If so, they must expect to have times of low prices. As a 
California fruit grower expressed it, “When I drive the car to town, 1 
don’t want to leave a heart-beat on the place.”” The price of that 
freedom must be paid during the period of low prices for the specialty 
produced. 
The specialty. crop problem is still further aggravated by too 
rapid expansion. In several cases the national and even the world’s 
production of specialty crops is grown in this state. For example, 
California produces all the canning peaches that are grown in the 
United States. We have recently increased our acreage of these 
neaches by 35 per cent. This means we shall have 35 per cent more 
peaches to market, which means a national increase of 35 per cent in 
the volume of canning peaches. It looks as though we had plenty of 
peaches for the present moment, and those folks should be checked