446 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



COLD STORAGE FOR NEIGHBORHOODS. 



BY C. H. PERKINS, NEWARK, N. Y . 



For some thirty years the writer of this paper has been personally interested in the 

 growing of apple orchards, in nursery stock and in the buying of apples. The business 

 has included orchards in Kansas and Michigan, also the exporting of apples from 

 Western New York to Europe. 



By the term " cold storage " I have not meant to imply the great storage houses in 

 cities and other points, where the temperature, by means of ice or chemicals, is kept and 

 even contracted to be kept at a certain point for months, where thousands of crates of 

 eggs, carloads of beef, and even ship-loads of fruits, are held and distributed to the 

 trade as they may be wanted; neither do I mean that system of cold storage used and 

 employed by the eight or ten large canning factories located in Western New York, 

 where immense amounts of Bartlett pears and other fruits are held for months for 

 canning purposes (a low estimate of Bartlett pears alone, held some years, would not be 

 less than fifty thousand bushels). 



The idea of this paper is, that neighborhood cold storage may be run in some of the 

 details and on about the same principles as those of the cooperative cheese factories of 

 the great dairy counties of this State, where, thirty or more years ago, every individual 

 dairyman made his own cheese, and the result of that system, which had been in use 

 years and years, was that there were as many grades, brands, qualities and sizes of 

 cheese as there were individual farmers, attended with all the different details of mak- 

 ing and selling the thousand and one different productions and brands. Then came the 

 cooperative system of cheese factories, by which the dairyman only contracted to 

 furnish the factory with the milk produced by a certain number of cows. As far as the 

 dairyman was concerned, all the details were done away with; instead of numerous 

 brands and qualities, one uniform quality was insured, the brand of the factory becom- 

 ing well known and found worthy, the natural result was that it was sought after, and 

 instead of, as formerly, so many small lots being sent to the large cities to be sold as best 

 they could, the buyers came to the doors of the factories, and now it is no unusual 

 incident for buyers from Liverpool or London to be in the markets of Little Falls or 

 Utica, and often favorite brands are shipped direct to Europe from the factories, and 

 the enhanced value more than covers the cost of manufacture, and the relief to the 

 dairyman, and to his wife, from the care and details of the old way, is beyond estimation^ 



Naturally, one asks what necessity for cooperative storage for apples in barrels, and 

 what particular advantage will accrue to the grower? The grower of apples in Western 

 New York has only to cast his eyes about him to perceive that he is being surrounded, 

 and that in the very near future market he has depended upon will be wholly 

 or in part monopolized by his Canadian and Western neighbors. Besides, another fac- 

 tor is looming up, larger and larger, as the years go by. It is said that a conservative 

 estimate of the oranges to be shipped this season from Florida is not less than seven 

 thousand to ten thousand carloads; that the crop of oranges in California will exceed 

 five thousand to seven thousand carloads; add to this the importation from the Medi- 

 terranean, and let it be understood that the consumption of oranges, to a certain extent, 

 comes in direct competition with that of the daily use of apples. Will the apple orch- 

 ardists of Western New York go with me and see what our Western neighbors are doing? 

 In 1890 I had occasion to spend a good part of the months of September and October 

 in Missouri and Kansas, buying the dried fruits (not the barreled apples), the produc- 

 tions of the orchards of those states. I found one orchard in Kansas with an out-put 

 of twenty thousand barrels, besides all the drying and cider apples. I found one 

 orchard near Springfield, Mo., that the net income was sixteen thousand dollars, and 

 plenty of others that the income from them ran from five thousand to eight thousand 

 dollars. This last season, traveling in Michigan, I found one section where, for twenty- 

 five miles long by eight miles wide, the farms were solid blocks of fruit. You would 

 hardly see a vestige of any other production than that of fruit. Great, double-decked 

 wagons, with three to six horses or mules, were hauling the fruit to the market, and it 

 was being distributed all over the Northwest. Then think that from New England, 

 from Maine to far west of the Missouri river, this planting of apple orchards has been 

 going on from year to year. Should all these orchards come into bearing and produce 

 even a fair or small crop, with present methods of marketing, would the fruit pay the 

 cost of harvesting to the Western New York grower? But we must not forget the 

 great increase of our population, the enormous growth of our cities and villages, the 

 immense export demand for our apples for the markets of Europe; also that, scattered 



