196 THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



Some years ago the melon business in Georgia was in 

 a state of panic. Carload after carload of watermelons 

 were sent to the northern market and dumped into the 

 water because they had reached a flooded market. Those 

 people got together and they forced freight rates down, and 

 they got the railroads to give them daily market reports, so 

 as to prevent the glutting of any single market, and the rail- 

 road companies to-day in the melon districts furnish the 

 growers with daily market reports posted at four o'clock in 

 the afternoon, so that the grower can go to each shipping 

 station and see not only what the condition of the market is 

 in all of the cities, but he can tell you how many cars are in 

 transit and where they are going, so .that he knows exactly 

 what to do with his melons, and the result has been that the 

 melon industry has taken a new lease of life and is now in a 

 satisfactory condition. Some years ago, in Colorado, they 

 developed a muskmelon business, but the growers got com- 

 peting against each other and got shipping their melons to 

 the same places, and the melon growers were going out of 

 business, and they organized and placed the whole product 

 of their section in the hands of one man, and only one man 

 controls the Rockford melons, and they go around the world, 

 and are entirely under the control of one man. A few years 

 ago three farmers met at Freeport, Illinois, and this is one 

 of the most remarkable examples of concerted effort I ever 

 knew of, and they each agreed that they would sell off their 

 mongrel poultr}-, and each agreed to keep one variety of 

 thoroughbred poultry. Then they agreed to all three adver- 

 tise in the papers, and all three were to advertise all three 

 varieties, and whenever one got an order for the variety he 

 didn't keep, he turned it over to the neighbor who did have 

 that variety, and to-day, for ten miles around Freeport, you 

 can't find anything but pure bred fowls, and Freeport, Illi- 

 nois, is the largest shipping district of thoroughbred fowls 

 in the world. The three original starters of that movement 

 are now independently well off, one of them publishes a cata- 

 logue that costs him fifty or sixty thousand dollars to get 

 out, and they have all made independent fortunes. Perhaps 

 the strongest and best organization among farmers and fruit 



