R. M. Teague Nurseries, San Dimas, Cal. 
37 
Twenty carloads of boxes of oranges direct from the pickers ready for grading and packing. 
is loaded in the cars for shipment every known device 
is used to prevent bumps and bruises. As the field 
boxes are taken from the wagon or truck they are 
usually set on belt or roller conveyors which carry 
them to the storage room. From here it is trucked 
to the elevator which carries the boxes, and auto- 
matically dumps the fruit into a hopper from which 
it passes through the brusher, which cleans it of all 
dust and dirt as it passes through. From here it 
passes on to the sorting table where the necessary 
help inspects each orange and sorts out the different 
grades, placing each on separate conveyors which 
carry the fruit to the grader or sizer running that 
particular grade of fruit. 
The common grades are designated as Fancy, 
Choice, Standards and culls, although some houses 
run additional grades known as Extra Fancy and 
Extra Choice. Only such oranges as are perfect in 
shape, color, texture and without blemishes are run 
in the Fancy or Extra Fancy grades. The choice or 
Extra Choice grade consists of all first class fruit not 
quite up to the standard necessary for the first grade. 
That is, they may not be quite so highly colored, of 
just a little rougher texture or may have some small 
blemishes, but nothing that will tend to affect their 
keeping or carrying quality. The standard grade 
consists of such fruit as will not pass for Fancy or 
Choice but that is sound and of marketable quality. 
All fruit that shows sign of having been bruised in 
handling or where the peel is checked or split so as 
to impair its keeping quality and all rough inferior 
fruits are put into the culls. In former years these 
were sorted over, the poorer ones being dumped and 
the best of them sold to peddlers at a few cents a box 
and came more or less in competition with the better 
grade of fruit. With the establishment of Citrus By- 
Product factories, most of these culls are now used 
up in the manufacture of marmalades, jellies, ex- 
tracts, etc., and while the price obtained for such 
fruit is not great it tends to prevent it from being 
placed on the market tp break down the price of good 
fruit. 
The modern packing houses are equipped with sep- 
arate graders for each grade of fruit run, also with 
automatic scales so that as the fruit passes from the 
sorting tables each grade is weighed before passing 
onto the grader and the grower knows just how many 
pounds of each grade has been run for him. Where 
automatic scales are not used, it is necessary to keep 
each grower's fruit separate until it is packed, making 
what is known as a "clean up" after each run, so as 
to ascertain the number of boxes of the different 
grades the grower's fruit packed out. 
As the fruit passes onto the graders, which con- 
sists of a series of revolving rollers set for the dif- 
ferent sizes to be packed, the smaller fruit drops out 
first and the larger sizes pass on to the end, being the 
last to drop out. As the tfruit drops through, it 
passes to packing bins arranged for each size. The 
packers take the fruit from these bins and after wrap- 
