92 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



ure. It does not matter how much of an acreage we have or 

 how many trees we have or how much fruit we have in a rea- 

 sonably small way, we can add to the profits or reduce the 

 expenses of that operation by the most earnest cooperation. The 

 only possible success that our friends in the Pacific Northwest 

 have made, and in the Rocky Mountain coast, is largely the profit 

 in the cooperative handling, in their working together. We of 

 New England have been a little too independent. 



The question of packages for the present and future is a very 

 serious one. The old, high barrel has been a very easy package 

 for us to use. and where the groceries break them up in quarts 

 and pecks and half pecks and half bushels, they have a reason- 

 ably wide distribution. But we must get a wider distribution. 

 We ni'ust get the orchard package directly into the home, into 

 every home in the land where apples are consumed. You can 

 sell a family a half bushel, or a peck, or a bushel, and once get 

 them into the family and the children will do the rest to some 

 extent. 



I don't believe in getting around the middleman, — the whole- 

 saler and the grocer are just as necessary as the horse and mule 

 or old ox on our farm, they are part of the machinery of pro- 

 duction and marketing, but at the same time they, as our agents, 

 want so far as possible to be able to pass the package along from 

 the grower to the consumer unbroken so as to increase con- 

 sumption. And whether the box of the Northwest whidi holds 

 a bushel is the right size package or not, I am not sure. I am 

 trying myself in an advertising scheme to reach the consum- 

 ers direct with that jjackage and we find that it is reasonably 

 satisfactory. I think it will be better for us to find the largest 

 possible package we can get into a home and then fill that pack- 

 age full of glorious good apples, top, bottom, middle and all 

 over — give them more than they expect every time. I believe 

 that will help us. But we have got to sell at a moderate price, 

 and that is the thing for us to work out. 



I seriously believe, under present conditions of labor, the 

 necessity for spraying three or four times, the pruning, the 

 feeding, the culture and the new high class package, that you 

 can't put up a barrel of apples as good as is demanded today 

 for one cent less than $2. You must reckon two dollars as 

 the cost of production of a barrel of good apples one year with 



