274 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



THE SUCCESSFUL FRUIT GROWER. 



A man today must be somewhat different from what he needed to be ten 

 or twenty years ago to make a success in fruit growing. He must be -n 

 better and smarter man. A man to make a very successful fruit grower 

 must be coversant with soils, a little bit of a chemist, somewhat of an 

 entomologist, and above all I would say a good salesman. Now, among 

 farmers we do not expect to find good salesmen, but we do occasionally 

 find them. When you have lifted the price five or ten cents on a package 

 by any means in your power, the large proportion of that is profit, but 

 until you passed the fixed charges there was nothing for you. One of the 

 fixed charges is the cost of production. That you have control of and 

 you may reduce. A basket may cost you to produce it, hanging upon the 

 tree or in the baskets, ten or fifteen cents, or it may only cost you five. 

 What it costs depends upon your own skill in growing. The details that 

 we have tried to bring out in the past two days have been looking toward 

 reducing this cost. Many things I have said look like expensive meth- 

 ods, but in my experience and others that I know the most expensive 

 methods are often economical because they produce good fruit for less 

 money. We all know that if you feed an animal it requires a certain 

 amount of food to maintain life. When you add to that you begin to get 

 gain, and there is a point somewhere where you begin to get profit. Just 

 so in growing fruit ; there is a certain amount of work that will give you 

 maximum results, either in quality or yield. To stop less than that you 

 may get less than expenses. If you go too far from it, then the cost 

 increases, and there is a right and wrong place to stop with these things, 

 but the majority stop rather under than over the profitable point of pro- 

 duction. Those things we have tried to make plain, but have not had 

 time to go into detail. 



Now, after producing a good crop comes the question of marketing, 

 and that has probably puzzled farmers more than anything else. It 

 would seem there ought to be a way to market our produce as others do 

 theirs. In fruit growing efforts have been made looking toward coopera- 

 tive selling, but I do not know of any success yet. Grand Rapids has 

 come the nearest to it, and I guess they are in a fair way to do a good 

 business. In fact they have done the best business last year in Michigan. 



NOW, WHY CAN WE NOT DO THESE THINGS? 



Farmers are as honest as other people, but perhaps no more so. There 

 are some slick rascals, and if the farmer is a rascal he is not as slick 

 about it; and perhaps they know better what their neighbors are than 

 anybody can tell them, and it seems immediately upon an attempt to 

 organize there is a distrust creeps in, and some men will want to crowd 

 an undersized package in, and an inferior lot of fruit in, and somebody 

 kicks; he wants to get the advantage of his neighbor just for the sake of 

 getting advantage sometimes. 



