148 STATE HORTICULTURAL St)CIETY. 



Mr. Smith : Do you have any local inspection of your fruit before it is 

 shown? A. The association does not in any way take charge of selling 

 the fruit. Every man is for himself. They are not responsible for it in 

 any way. Every grower makes his own bargain and sells his own fruit. 

 For years we have provided a room down town, w^here outside buyers 

 can go and repack their fruit, if they wish, repack for shipping. We keep 

 a stock of baskets on hand to sell at reasonable cost to those who wish to 

 buy covers, etc., and fix up the purchases. The fruit, when it comes on 

 the Grand Rapids market, is not covered, and a great deal of it is shipped 

 in that way. 



Mr. Morrill : The expense is very small, in this matter, to each indivi- 

 dual, and the results probably are beyond computation. If they had made 

 no effort to call attention to their fruit they would not have been nearly 

 so well situated financially as they are today. 



Mr. Munson : Our expenses are generally less than |200 per season. I 

 think last year we had about $150. Our rules are that it costs $1 to be a 

 member and |1 extra for every thousand bushels of peaches, or the 

 equivalent in any other fruit. 



Q. The membership runs a little over 400? A. No, not that is paid in. 



Q. About what proportion of your fruitgrowers are members of the 

 association? A. I presume not over one third. Most of the larger 

 growers are. There is always that tendency to shirk even one dollar of 

 expense. The others reap the benefits as much as those who pay the 

 dollars, but we do not pretend to furnish them circulars or give them 

 references; and yet, in an incidental way, they reap the benefits. 



Mr. Smith: This transportation question is properly a local one, and 

 inasmuch as we have no local organization it is utterly useless for us 

 to expect great benefits from any system of this kind. For twenty years 

 we have tried and tried to move in this very direction, and we have so 

 entirely lost control of anything like' organization, that we are simply at 

 the mercy of every one who wants our fruit, whether in Chicago, Mil- 

 waukee, or anywhere else. Our friends in Grand Rapids have their organ- 

 ization, they worked the thing up and they will stick to it, but we can not 

 do anything until we have more confidence in each other than we have 

 shown heretofore. We will trust any one rather than ourselves. We will 

 trust commission men in Chicago or Milwaukee, whom we have never 

 seen and never expect to see, but we won't trust one another. 



Mr. Munson : ^Ve find in Grand Rapids that it makes a great differ- 

 ence where we are backed up by the association. Instead of being short 

 and crusty, these people would invite us into the office or to make 

 some appointment, and then they would talk it over and help us 

 in every way possible, give us every privilege they could. Sometimes it 

 would be only a better privilege in regard to loading, or a more con- 

 venient time of leaving, and sometimes it was more, as in the case of the 

 peach rates. The cut from a rate and a half to one rate originated in our 

 society, and it was two or three years before we got that; but we kept 

 hammering at them all the while until we finally got it, and now it is only 

 one first-class rate. That has helped our town thousands of dollars every, 

 year. 



