6o THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



The President: I notice you are a little bashful. 



Mr. Hale : I am glad you appreciate that ; the rest 

 always have. This question of cold storage on the farm, 

 especially as the worthy president says, he has to pay fifty 

 cents a barrel if he stores off from the farm, is a serious one. 

 It is a very serious question with the majority of the members 

 of this association I imagine, because we are nearly all small 

 growers and have only a moderate amount of fruit that 

 we need to carry through the winter, or well into the 

 winter, where cold storage would be of assistance. The 

 old plan of ice overhead and a sort of ice-box of any size you 

 might have,- is almost a delusion and a snare. The only real, 

 thoroughly first-class cold storage is the mechanical cold stor- 

 age, where they have the ammonia process in the larger 

 cities, and the other process known as the gravity brine pro- 

 cess, in which you pipe your buildings practically as you do 

 for the ammonia process, and have large tanks in the upper 

 story of your buildings, and by keeping them filled with 

 chopped ice and salt, you can bring the temperature down to 

 the freezing- point and keep your room as cold as by the 

 ammonia process, and when the necessity of storage is over, 

 the expense ceases, and that is the only farm process that is 

 available and satisfactory ; but that requires an investment 

 of a considerable amount of maney, and I question whether 

 an orchardist that had less than 500 barrels of apples to store 

 annually could aft'ord to do that. But thickly settled Con- 

 necticut ought to be, able to cooperate among members of this 

 Society, friends and neighbors, so that there could be a fairly 

 good big cold storage house in every orchard neighborhood. 

 By cooperating in that way and combining in the building of 

 a cold storage plant, it is possible, and will come in a few 

 years. 



We have had the grange in Connecticut nearly thirty 

 years now, and we have talked and preached a good deal 

 about cooperation, but it is most all talk. So in this associa- 

 tion, we organize for our mutual protection and advancement, 



