804 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



commercial orchardinji: being: almost unknown. Within the past 

 few years whole sections of the country have become famed for 

 large orchards and extensive production of fruit that meets with 

 regular demand in the city markets of this country and abroad. In 

 these well-defined fruit growing areas the small i)lantings for home 

 use have given away to large commercial orchards not infrequently 

 of hundreds of acres in extent. 



At the present time there are in this country more than 200 mil- 

 lion apple bearing trees producing in a normal season, from 120 to 

 180 million bushels of fruit. This represents an increase of about 

 80 million bearing trees in the past decade. Georgia with her 

 16 millions of peach trees, Texas and several of the Southwestern 

 states with their enormous commercial peach orchards rapidly de- 

 veloping, afford illustrations of the growth of the peach business. 

 In other lines of fruit growing the development has been propor- 

 tionally as rapid though not quite so extensive. 



This rapid growth of the fruit industry has called for the highest 

 development of means for handling and distributing the crop and 

 for preserving it in sound condition until it can be placed in the 

 hands of the consumer. The recent application of cold tempera- 

 tures to the preservation of fruit, boih in the transportation and in 

 the store-house, is a very important factor in this connection. The re- 

 frigerator car and the cold storage house have developed with the 

 growth of the fruit industry and are now indispensable to the suc- 

 cessful handling and distribution of the crop. No complete sta- 

 tistics of the American warehouse business have been compiled, 

 but it is probable that there Are from 700 to 1,000 cold storage ware- 

 houses in the United States that store apples and other fruits to 

 a greater or less extent and the number is rapidly increasing. This 

 system of warehouses, cooled by mechanical methods of refrigera- 

 tion, has largely been developed since 1890. Time is required to 

 reduce a business of this kind to the best working basis and natu- 

 rally many problems relative to the proper treatment of fruit for 

 cold storage still confront the warehousemen, the fruit handler and 

 the orchardist who stores his fruit. Some of these problems have 

 received consideration through the pomological investigations of 

 the Bureau of Plant Industry during the past two years. In these 

 investigations the fruit has been under observation in the orchard 

 as well as in the warehouse, so that a full record of the life history 

 of the fruit has been obtained. 



The experiments which have thus far been conducted all poiut 

 toward the fact, thai so far as the keeping of fruit in cold storage is 

 concerned, as much or more may depend n])on the conditions and 

 environment under which the fruit is grown as upon the treatment 

 it receives in the warehouse. Foi' exaiii]»l<'. take the case of fruit 



