42 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



In this way the fruit would often bring more than when a hun- 

 dred or two barrels of different kinds are offered at the same 

 time. The Wealthy and ^Iclntosh the buyer could sell at once, 

 but the Ben Davis and Roxbury Russets he would have to hold 

 in some way until the market was ready for them. The holding 

 of these costs and reduces the market value of the entire lot of 

 fruit offered. 



Buyers come to our State for apples. They have found it 

 necessary to employ local agents to drive around and buy the 

 fruit as needed. In some cases these agents have been paid ten 

 cents a barrel and sometimes more, and a large part of the apples 

 are sold in some such way. This ten cents would go very far 

 towards paying the storage and packing of the fruit. We do 

 not realize how much it costs to sell our fruit crop, and if we 

 can do anything to save this cost to the grower it would be a 

 great help in handling the fruit. Where quantities of the fruit 

 are stored by the growers in a single storage house, the manager 

 could be reached by a message from the commission man or 

 shipper, and there would be available enough Baldwins or other 

 varieties for a carload any day. They are stored by the track 

 and it is but a small job to load a car. In this way the dealer 

 gets the variety he wants, he gets it without sending a man out 

 for the fruit, and he is sure of getting good fruit. To secure 

 this now he not only has to have his man buy the fruit but he 

 must have immediate charge of the packing as well. 



The care of the inferior fruit. In recent years there has been 

 a great waste of fruit which was hardly good enough to sell. 

 The evaporated fruit that is sold in the State comes from New 

 York state and our waste fruit is fed out to the stock or allowed 

 to rot on the ground. At a storage house, such as that under 

 consideration, this class of fruit could be evaporated, canned 

 or made into vinegar. In New York state the growers find this 

 sort of work profitable and we do not see why the same thing 

 done in Maine, where we have the fruit, the brains to use it and 

 the money necessary to do it, would not be profitable. 



Barrels and boxes. The cost of these has been an important 

 item in the fruit business the past few years. More than this, 

 part of the time it has been impossible to provide barrels. The 

 storage corporation could help the farmers by handling these sO' 



