No. 4.] STANDARDIZATION OF FARM PRODUCTS. 45 



offered carloads of them at 15 cents a basket after he got them 

 and could not find a market. Could the government do any- 

 thing to open up a market? If those cars could have been 

 sent to Holyoke and the consumers could have got them at 50 

 cents a basket they would have been sold. 



Mr. McCarthy. There isn't a doubt that a great deal of 

 the peach crop this year could have been taken care of in the 

 smaller places if there was a wholesaler in that region who 

 knew how to take that stuff and deal in it, or if there was some 

 open market place. Just see how that open market place 

 would act. If you had the open market place you could bill 

 the town. In many of these cities the country papers or little 

 city papers will not take an advertisement of produce that is in 

 the market place, because the advertisers, who are the retailers 

 around there, will not stand for it; but you can always bill the 

 town and say there are so many barrels of apples or peaches in 

 the market, and you can make up your mind that the women 

 are coming there and going to get them at prices worth while 

 to the shipper. I think there probably was an overproduction 

 of peaches this year, considering the means of transportation in 

 this country and the unorganized state of the market, but that 

 overproduction, could be easily taken care of if we had some 

 machinery for distributing it through the smaller places. I 

 know that the Sun-kist orange people at the present time have 

 been eliminating the wholesaler in a great many places, and 

 they are getting down to the retailer. If you will notice in 

 many bf the cities this year the Sun-kist orange people are 

 advertising in the country papers. A city like Chicago will 

 have a great lot of stuff dumped into it, and sometimes the 

 machinery for distributing this produce into smaller places 

 where there are no good wholesale houses or public markets is 

 not sufficiently worked out. I know an express company man 

 dealing with one of the big food divisions of the express com- 

 pany, who, as an experiment, began to advertise and put into 

 a lot of country towns some of this peach product, and where 

 they would say in one place, "Well, we could dispose of 10 

 bushels," he told me that he often put in 75 and 100 bushels. 

 So you can see that the distribution of our produce is in a very 

 crude condition; we haven't got it mapped. Why? Louis 



