DISCUSSION. 141 



I have had some experience in raising and marketing fruit 

 here in Nebraska. Quite hkely you have been told how to mar- 

 ket fruit, — that you must select the best, put it in good attrac- 

 tive packages so it will sell and get a reputation. Of course, all 

 this is well and will help you, and you will have no trouble to 

 sell that product. But what good is all this going to do you, 

 after you have selected the fruits, planted and raised them, if 

 the transportation companies are going to get all your profit be- 

 fore your product gets to market? That's what the case is at 

 present. This question of freight rates is a vital one and in- 

 terests all. 



A car of apples shipped from Auburn to Chadron, Nebraska^ 

 a distance of about five hundred miles costs eighty-four cents, 

 per hundred pounds. A car of apples shipped from New York 

 to Auburn, a distance over three times as great, costs only 

 seventy-five cents per hundred pounds. The rate on a car of 

 apples from Brock, Nebraska, to Waubay, South Dakota is fifty- 

 two cents, while from New York to Waubay the rate is only 

 thirty-nine cents per hundred. As a result of this discrimina- 

 tion, 250,000 bushels of fruit rotted on the ground in five south- 

 eastern counties of Nebraska last season. As I told the Gen- 

 eral Freight Agent of the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Val- 

 ley, "If you give us a reasonable rate up to Chadron, you will 

 probably haul twenty cars of apples up there, whereas now you 

 don't haul one." 



Down in the south-eastern section of the state, — Otoe, Nema- 

 ha, Pawnee and Johnson counties, we have a horticultural asso- 

 ciation or organization, and at a meeting we had the other day, 

 this resolution was unanimously adopted: 



"Whereas, it has come to the knowledge of the Nebraska 

 Fruit Growers' Association that the interstate freight rate on 

 fruit discriminates against the fruit growers of Nebraska, 

 therefore be it 



Resolved: That this association requests our legislators to 

 ask congress by joint resolution to support an amendment to 

 the interstate commerce law which provides that when the 

 interstate commission shall find that the rates charged by any 

 common carrier are unreasonable, they shall have the power to 



