NINETEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 239 



wants a regular supply of a known quality or grade of fruit. 

 They do not want a lot of goods that will be shipped of poor 

 quality one time and high another. They want to be assured 

 that they are going to get a good quality right along. Now 

 it is along that line that we have worked the thing out. We 

 adopted their methods of packing. We sent out to the Coast 

 and got them by the carload. W r e got their packages. We 

 wanted boxes which would enable us to compete with those 

 western chaps. We wanted the box to be identical. We did 

 not want to give the buyers an opportunity to say, "Oh, that 

 fruit comes from the east where the fruit is no good." I am 

 satisfied that in a majority of cases, at first, before they knew 

 what was going on, a good many of the people bought that 

 fruit as western fruit. Now some of them do not want to 

 buy western fruit when they can get eastern fruit. You 

 need not fear western competition if you adopt good methods. 

 Those methods arc not going to be expensive. We have 

 tried it. A few years ago before we were forced to adopt 

 the co-operative method of handling our fruit, a good many 

 of our growers did not spray in time. We would lose a cer- 

 tain amount of the foliage, and the trees would be weakened. 

 The next year we would not have as good fruit because the 

 trees were weakened. All that sort of thing has been im- 

 proved, and it has made a great difference with the growers 

 themselves, bcause they have learned that they can depend 

 on their fruit crop as a certainty, in fact, we have almost 

 come to look upon it as a little more certain than a crop of 

 corn or wheat. That means that we are able to handle our 

 peaches and other fruits. We grow them cheaper, and our 

 people are planting out more and more. 



Sometimes you hear it said, where are you going to get 

 labor? You say that labor is hard to get. It is sometimes, 

 unless you get hold of it in the right way. We find no diffi- 

 culty there. We are not troubled with a scarcity of labor, 

 unless at some particular time when we have very dry 

 weather, when our peach crop comes on a little quickly. In 



