18 " STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



aud there "will be a company to handle, ship, and get it into the hands 

 of the consumers in better shape, more satisfactorily, than could the 

 producers, and they Avill know how to get their transportation properly, 

 at a low enough cost and with safety and convenience, and the con- • 

 sumers will get it just exactly as it is represented to be. Of course, 

 this method of packing fruit, where everybody packs it and everybody 

 does it dirterently, and each gets a little different package and makes 

 a different grade of fruit, a different (lualit}^, and it is all put up and 

 sent to the general market where the good and the bad are mixed and 

 jumbled together, the consumer does not know exactly what he is get- 

 ting and the buj'ers all suffer for it. Something else must grow out 

 of it besides this indiscriminate individual shipping and handling of 

 fruit. It seems to me that on a large scale, the method set forth in this 

 paper might be subject to objections. The paper says every individual 

 is given credit for his own fruit and that a record is kept of every 

 individual's fruit and he is given credit for just what he has. That 

 would require a good deal of labor. Perhaps a large company could 

 buy all the fruit and grade it and put the first-class and second-class 

 and third-class each by itself and sell it by itself, and they would not 

 have to keep a record with every individual. I am in hope that from 

 this agitation, as I have noticed it all over the country, by and by the 

 fruit business will grow into a system of that kind, when buyers will 

 take all the fruit, handle it, put it up and put it in the hands of the 

 consumer. 



Mr. Kellogg: Mr. Lawton has struck the key-note to the whole busi- 

 ness. Heretofore the fruitgrower has insisted on having all there was 

 in the business — the w'hole grab. This is a day of division of labor. 

 We invent machinery and we set one man at one thing and another 

 man at another thing, and those men are exjtected to become efficient 

 in their work and do it Avith great perfection. Now, when we get an 

 association of fruitgrowers together whose whole energy and whole time 

 is and should be spent in producing fine fruit, merchantable fruit, let that 

 be their branch. You can not organize these institutions unless you put 

 money into them. You can not get men to put money into somebody's 

 else hands — they are suspicious about it, and business in that way is 

 done at a loss. NoW', the time has come when fruitgrowing has assumed 

 such gigantic proportions that the marketing is such a big thing that 

 one of two things will ensue — capital Avill come together for the purpose 

 of engaging in the distribution of fruit, as a business, and there will 

 be a central house and a standard of grading; and a man in his store 

 in a distant state where fruits are not grown on a large scale can send 

 his telegram for a certain grade, and know with a certainty as to what he 

 is going to get. Now, I think the time has come, as Mr. Lawton says, 

 when the fruitgrowers will bend their whole energies to producing a 

 marketable fruit of high (juality, and another class of men will bend 

 their energies to a perfect system of distribution. It must be so. In 

 some localities, where there are not large quantities of fruit, men may 

 get together and do these things, but they must do them in a sort of 

 retail way. A small business is like a ship. Mr. Carnegie now boasts 

 that his ships will carry more ore to market than any other ships in 

 the world, therefore nobody else can compete with him, because he 

 does it for less. It is so in the fruit business. If you are to have the 

 work organized vou must do it on a large scale, and that requires 



