No. 1. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 561 



you and I have to. Look up your commission man, get acquainted 

 with him, and get him to come to your orchard, show him your 

 way of handling fruit, show him that you are doing honest and 

 careful grading, that you are reliable, and he will go back, and 

 begin to advertise your fruit. When you begin to pick your fruit, 

 ask him to send down a man to see how you pick it, and how you pack 

 it for him, and he will go back and get a little more money out 

 of that fruit for himself and for you, too. If you are doing busi- 

 ness on a large enough scale, get a good newspaper reporter out to 

 your orchard, if you have to pay his railroad fare or carriage hire, 

 or anything else. Get him to believe in you, get him to believe in 

 your trees, and it will pay; there is always a good story to be had 

 out of a good crop of fruit. You may convert your commission man 

 and retail fruit dealer from a good many of his unsatisfactory ways 

 of fruit handling and selling, if you show him you are trying to do 

 better. We must use the commission man in a good many ways, 

 and more and more through him, reach the consumer. It must be 

 done by honest packing, a high quality of fruit, making it just a 

 little bit better in the middle, if possible, than it is on the top; then 

 put on your own labels, telling just what it is, and who grew it, 

 and get the consumers out to your orchard; give them a taste of 

 your fruit, and sell them a lot more for double what it is worth, 

 and it will pay you. I could tell you of some large orchardists to- 

 day, who are selling direct to the consumer, sometimes two and 

 oven three hundred miles away, once they get their acquaintance, 

 and get their faith. It is very profitable, indeed, once you get their 

 faith, and get into this business of direct family trade through 

 high quality and honest pack of your fruit. 



The next thing the peach grower is up against is the Yellows. 

 This is something we are likely always to have with us. The 

 first indication of it to most observers is when they begin to see 

 a little pennyroyal like sprouts on trunk or main branches, and a 

 little hectic blush or red spots on the fruit, with red thread like 

 lines running through the flesh. We are up against not knowing 

 what- the Yellows is two or three years before it first shows itself 

 in this way, and by that time it has reached serious proportions. 

 At the first sign of it, take that tree out of the orchard; if it is on 

 a Sunday morning, don't begin to leave it over Sunday. Pull it out 

 then and there; if it is on a Sunday morning, get out and burn it 

 before you go to church, even if you don't get to church that day. 

 No matter whether you discover it in July or in September, take 

 it out, and take it out at once. I speak thus feelingly, because I 

 grow peaches more than any other fruit, and I have struggled 

 against this dread Yellows and in some small degree overcome it. 

 I told you that the nigger is a born gambler. We have three or 

 four hundred of them on my place down in Georgia, and we have 

 to have watchmen night and day. So when we catch one in any 

 offense not altogether in the nature of a crime, we hold a court 

 of our own on the place. I am usually the judge, and the superin- 

 tendent is the prosecuting attorney, or he is the judge, and I am 

 the prosecutor. We do this to save these poor fellows from being 

 taken to court and delivered to the rigors of the law; down there 



36—7—1908. 



