_Evaporated peaches._--In regions distant from the markets evaporation is an even richer resource of the peach-grower than canning. Thus, in California in 1909, the value of the peaches canned was $3,013,203 while the dried product was valued at $2,333,137. The figures are greater for canned peaches, but be it remembered that the canners' profits and the cost of the cans must be deducted, whereas evaporated peaches are almost wholly a home product, the grower receiving all of the proceeds. The dried product is pure peach, almost devoid of water. Peaches may be cured as dry as a bone and as hard as wood so that the product will keep indefinitely in the temperate zone, and in this super-dried state is shipped to the tropics. The apple is evaporated in large quantities but is a by-product while the cured peach is usually a primary product--a difference worth noting, for, with the apple, the cream of the crop goes to the fresh fruit-market while the cured peach is of the same grade as the dessert and canned fruit. The dried-peach industry thrives only in regions, as California, where the summers are sunny and rainless. The product is shipped so cheaply that peach-growers in cloudy and humid climates, as in New York, cannot use artificial heat in evaporators and compete with the cured peaches from the Pacific Slope. In times past when communities were more dependent on local resources, the farmer living almost wholly off of his farm, peaches were cured in humid America though the product, in appearance at least, was much inferior to that from regions having favorable conditions for the evaporation of fruit. New York can hardly hope to compete with California in curing peaches but two factors make it barely possible that this State might make a minor industry out of curing peaches. The factors are the enormous production of peaches in the State, over-production being frequent, and the existence of a great number of apple-evaporators which might be utilized in curing the earlier ripening peaches. It seems worth while, therefore, to go rather fully into the details of curing peaches as practiced in California with the hope that their methods may be modified for use in New York evaporators. The subjoined footnote gives the best account we are able to find of the dried-fruit industry in California and of curing peaches in particular.[209]