Peach-growing is a game of chance from start to finish; advantages and disadvantages in location are exceedingly changeable; risks to tree and crop attendant on weather are many; the trees are beset on all sides by diseases and parasites for two of which in New York, yellows and little-peach, there is no preventive, antidote nor alleviation; transportation is perilous, competition keen, and markets fitful. Add variability in investment and the difficulties in calculating profits in peach-growing are apparent. On the other hand, keeping accounts in peach-growing is not as difficult and complicated as in growing other fruits. The peach is not as long-lived, barring accidents the trees bear more regularly, the crop is quickly disposed of, orchard-operations among growers are more uniform, and, no doubt, the very fact that the peach partakes so much of speculation makes growers a little keener on striking balances at the end of the season. At any rate there is a great body of material in the reports of the horticultural societies in New York on costs in peach-growing and from these data, together with notes taken for several years, we venture to estimate the present costs per acre of the several items entering into peach-production. To attempt to go further and calculate profits, with all of the inconstant factors of yields and markets, would be guessing pure and simple. Let us consider the cost of production in a ten-acre orchard. This unit is now, however, rather too small, for more and more growers are giving up general farming, finding peach-growing an exacting, full-time vocation. Often enough it is successfully combined with the growing of other fruits, but less and less so with the growing of farm-crops. The first item in cost of production is interest on investment. What value is to be placed on a New York peach-orchard? The value must be calculated from the cost of land and trees and the labor and the deferred dividends until the orchard comes into profitable bearing. Selling price is never a safe gauge with the peach, sales usually being made under conditions more abnormal than in almost any other phase of farming and showing great variability in every locality. Suppose we place the value at $400 per acre, a sum sufficiently high to cover, besides the cost of the orchard, the overhead expenses of houses and barns that would fall to ten acres of a New York farm. Interest now runs at five percentum so that the first expense item is $20.00 per acre on investment. Assessment rates on land so valued would bring taxes up to $1.00 per acre.