PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING. 307 



Mr. Sherwood: Something like a tomato crate? 



Mr. Hale: SoDiething like a tomato crate. It should be made of 

 better material, whiter, but that geueral package seems to give the best 

 satisfaction in the trade for long shipping. 



A Member: How large are your baskets? 



Mr. Hale: The baskets hold four quarts when well filled. 



Mr, Morrill: About five pounds' weight on the average, do they not? 



Mr. Hale: The whole package, as it is usually packed in Georgia, 

 weighs, loaded, thirty-six to thirty-eight pounds. We pack ours so tightly 

 that they weigh about forty-five pounds. 



Mr. Morrill: I used the same package the past season, with great 

 satisfaction, on fine fruit. 



Mr. Hale : The objection is, it is hard work. It is rather diflflcult to 

 pack the fruit in, but the girls will learn how to do it all right. 



Mr. Lyon: What about mechanical graders? 



Mr. Hale: You ought to know^ better than to ask that question, you 

 dear old soul I (Laughter.) 



Mr. Morrill: I am glad Judge Eamsdell asked that question, because 

 so many of our people use graders, and so many of them that I know to 

 be good fruitgrowers (that is, known to have that reputation) have told 

 me repeatedly that they could use them satisfactorily, that there was no 

 injury to the fruit. An agent of the Jones Grader company came along 

 and I told him I could not use it at all ; I didn't like it. He insisted upon 

 sending me one on trial. I took it and used it on about five bushels of 

 peaches that were in good shipping condition as we picked them. We 

 took the baskets of peaches as they ran through in the different grades, 

 and examined them, and you could not see that they were injured at all. 

 1 set them away until the next day, the time at which they would ordin- 

 arily be marketed, and then peeled them, and there were innumerable 

 dark spots under the skin, just ready for decay. If that fruit had been a 

 little riper it would have been in the first stage of decay the next day. 

 Consequently I decided the only way to use a grader was to pick peaches 

 too green to*^ be eaten. I want to speak of a little object lesson that I 

 saw in Chicago last summer— it is only one of a hundred object lessons 

 which may be seen by a man who is watching the other end of the 

 business, as Mr. Hale urges you to do; but this one was so marked that 

 I must call your attention to it. A commission man on South Water 

 street, one morning when I was there, was receiving any quantity and all 

 kinds of peaches, and when I stepped into the store a young man was 

 standing by a pile of poaches in the six-basket Georgia crates, as we call 

 them, the same Mr. Hale uses and the same as have been taken up by 

 some of our best Michigan growers. In that pile of crates was chiefly 

 one variety of peach which was known as Engle, a medium-size, fine 

 peach, in two grades, the name of the owner marked upon them, and there 

 were thirty pounds of fruit, probably, in each. The dealer sat there, 

 simply checking olf whatever the buyer wanted of those crates, and 

 there were buyers every minute taking them until they were gone — 

 taking one grade or the other, whichever fitted their business. A load 

 of peaches in baskets of the common fifth size (I do not know that I 

 should name the town, but I will, it was from Fennville— out of the 

 regular Fennville fruit train of mixed lots) was backed up to the curb 



