THEIR CULTURE AND MANAGEMENT 



21 



close, as one orange with a long stem 

 may puncture or bruise a dozen or 

 more while passing from the picking 

 bags to the boxes, and from there to 

 the packing house. 



It was estimated that from 85 to 

 90% of the heavy decay in California 

 oranges, a few years ago, was directly 

 due to the methods of picking and 

 handling the fruit in the orchards, so 

 that it is to the interest of the or- 

 chardist to personally see that the 



Furrow system of irrigation. 



pickers are careful in cutting the fruit 

 from the trees and placing them in 

 the boxes. The picking bags used 

 for this purpose are "open at the bot- 

 tom, and if the picker is careful, the 

 fruit can be let out of these into the 

 boxes without allowing it to drop or 

 bump against other fruit in the box. 

 Care must also be exercised in filling 

 the boxes so that when stacked in the 

 wagon on top of each other, the boxes 

 will not be so full that the fruit will 

 get bruised or smashed. All wagons 

 for hauling the fruit should be 



To those who have never seen an 

 orange packing house in operation, a 

 description of the methods employed 

 therein will, no doubt, be of some in- 

 terest. The fruit after being taken in 

 at the receiving door is trucked to the 

 grader, then dumped into a hopper 

 and carried by a belt conveyer to the 

 brushes; these are so arranged that 

 as it passes through, every particle of 

 dust is brushed off. When the fruit 

 is very dirty it is sometimes neces- 

 sary to first 

 pass it through 

 washers where 

 the smut and 

 dirt is washed 

 off by brushes 

 operating i n 

 water; it must 

 then be thor- 

 oughly dried 

 before going 

 back to the 

 grader. If the 

 washing is not 

 necessary, the 

 fruit passes 

 from brushes 

 to the sorting 

 table and is 

 there selected 

 as to quality. 

 The regular 

 grades are 

 fancy, choice, 

 standards and 

 culls, although 



some packers put up an extra fancy and 

 an extra choice brand. As the fruit is 

 sorted, it is conveyed to the different 

 graders. In large houses a grader is 

 used for each brand, which are so ar- 

 ranged that the fruit passes over roller 

 adjusted so that the different sizes 

 fall through into bins arranged on 

 either side of the grader, and from 

 which the packers take the fruit and 

 pack it into boxes. Where only one 

 grader is used and one brand of fruit 

 runs at a time, the remaining fruit is 

 taken from the sorting table before it 



equipped with springs so as to reduce reaches the grader and sent back to 



the jar and jolting to a minimum. 



The modern equipment in packing 

 houses is calculated to reduce to a 

 minimum the chances of bruising the 

 fruit while passing from the receiv- 

 ing door to the car, and tlie old-time 

 graders and elevators whereby the 

 fruit was subjected to drops of from 

 six to eight inches have been con- 

 signed to the scrap heap. 



be run over the grader later on. In 

 the larger houses where several grad- 

 ers are in operation at the same time, 

 each grade of fruit is passed from the 

 sorting tables to a belt conveyor car- 

 rying it to the grader handling that 

 grade of fruit; this does away with 

 the necessity of passing any of the 

 fruit over the sorting table a second 

 time. In sorting the fruit, only such 



