STATK nORTICTILTlTRAL SOPIETY. 1 I'T 



together to the Scamc market. But of course no such alternative is neces- 

 sary, as it is not difficult to make both remunerative. As a financial 

 measure, careful fruit growers would frequently be justified in purchasing 

 their neighbor's poor fruit to keep it out of market, although it is true 

 that the Chicago fruit-men are exercising, from year to year, a greater 

 discrimination in the quality of fruits they buy, and therefore providing 

 a less tempting market for inferior grades. In a large number of 

 cases, not only is deception used in regard to the quality, but also in the 

 quantity, of fruit actually delivered. For instance, what uncertain quan- 

 tities prevail in berry boxes and peach baskets ! I bought, for a special 

 purpose, a crate (sixteen boxes) of strawberries, and upon emptying them 

 out found I had only a nicely rounded and full peck measure of berries. 

 Upon examination I concluded, in a number of instances, the berries had 

 been packed in the wrong end of the box. Peaches were first brought to 

 our market, as far back as I can remember, in half-bushel packages. 

 These were gradually reduced in size till no effort of imagination could 

 stretch them to half-bushel dimensions, when they were represented as 

 thirds of bushels. When the process of systematic contraction had been 

 continued a time longer, effrontery itself could only call the diminished 

 basket a peck, and so they are still confidingly named, but I found last 

 summer, upon actual trial, that it took six of these pecks to make a bushel ! 

 I will propound to mathematicians the interesting problem I have not been 

 quite able to solve : at the present rate of reduction, how much less than 

 nothing will peach-baskets hold at the close of the next decade ? A bar- 

 rel of apples contains the same uncertain quantity. The Michigan barrel 

 is now, by statute, a flour-barrel in size, and is so made, except at St. Jo. 

 and in the peach belt, where the continually shrinking peach basket seems 

 to have demoralized the faculty of measurement and quantity. Buyers 

 of apples in Chicago are beginning to appreciate the difference in size 

 of apple barrels, and they ask for the big three-bushel Michigan barrel. 

 These command from twenty-five cents to fifty cents more than the smaller. 

 Fruits of all kinds should be sold here, as they are in California and Ore- 

 gon, entirely by weight. This would solve the vexed problem of the 

 rightful size of packages ; but, till that intelligent era shall arrive, it be- 

 hooves every reputable fruit grower to make his packages hold the actual 

 quantity specified, and to see to it that the average quality of tlie fruit be 

 as nearly as possible the same. Then he should brand on the consign- 

 ment, "quantity and quality guaranteed," superscribing his own name. 

 I have been a shipper of green apples from Michigan, for the past three 

 years, and have shipped only select apples (drying the others in our 

 Alden factory), branding the barrels with our name and guaranty. Now, 

 there are grocers, dealers and consumers, who call regularly for our brand, 

 paying fifty cents to one dollar more per barrel for our shipments, than 

 for those of the regular packers, because, as they tell our commission 

 men, our apples pan out alike all the way through the barrel, and do not 

 grow poorer as they go down. If all fruits were faithfully marketed in this 

 way, and only the select fruit shipped green, while tlie second grades 

 were utilized and sold in a preserved form, the fruit growers' interests 



