WASTE IN DISTRIBUTION 257 



crop and transporting same to Madison. With very perishable goods 

 hundreds of instances of extreme wastefulness could be cited in which 

 the farmer not only has a total loss of his product but freight to pay. 

 Thus at various times there come into the markets of the northern states 

 a larger supply of melons or peaches than can be disposed of at the 

 current prices. The retailers take advantage of the situation to pur- 

 chase at a lower price from the commission merchants; but not infre- 

 quently they find it more profitable to them to maintain existing retail 

 selling prices with smaller sales than to lower the price sufficiently to 

 dispose of the additional material. Under such circumstances carloads, 

 and even shiploads, of fruit or melons may rot when the people — and 

 especially the people in less favorable financial condition — would have 

 been glad to have the products thus destroyed if they could have been 

 obtained at a low price. 



After a farmer has had an experience for any year like the above 

 he stops shipping, and the remainder of the material rots in the field. 

 For instance, last summer this was the situation in Colorado with regard 

 to cantaloupes. Vast quantities of splendid fruit were a total loss, and 

 yet prices for cantaloupe at the various markets of the middle West and 

 East were high. At Madison, Wisconsin, the lowest rate at which good 

 Colorado cantaloupes were selling was ten cents each in lots of ten or 

 a dozen. Every year furnishes many illustrations like the above. Not 

 only does this occur, but our distributing system is so bad that some- 

 times even the semi-permanent vegetables are a total loss to the farmer 

 because of a glut of a certain market. For instance, the April number of 

 The World's Work tells of an instance where a farmer was advised 

 by a commission merchant that the market for onions at Philadelphia 

 was good. After making shipment the farmer received the information 

 that onions were arriving in such quantities that the market might 

 break. When the farmer received his statement from the commis- 

 sion merchant he found that his carload of onions had sold for 

 enough to cover all charges except $9 of the freight, and he was asked 

 by the commission merchant to remit that amount. Says the farmer: "I 

 still think he is an honest commission man if there ever was one; and 

 I don't know that any one was particularly to blame. But I do know that 

 I furnished Philadelphia with a car of good onions free and paid part of 

 the freight; and I have no doubt that the other twenty cars that went in 

 at the same time were furnished free. But I hope the other twenty farm- 

 ers were not fools enough to pay the freight." With satisfactory methods 

 of distribution situations like the above, which occur in numerous localities 

 and for various products almost every year, would not exist. Certainly 

 we must work out some methods of distribution under which abundant 

 crops will give larger returns to the farmers than small crops; yet the 

 latter is now frequently the case for products which are perishable or 

 semi-perishable, and is sometimes true for the more permanent crops. 

 This must cease to be true else the principle of conservation which de- 

 mands that we increase the productivity of the soil is wide of the mark. 



