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THE CONNECTICUT FOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



The second point, and one more difficult to overcome, is 

 the matter of markets, or to speak more accurately, the reputa- 

 tion of our fruit on the market ; I have classed this under the 

 head of advantages, too, but at present I believe it is more of 

 a disadvantage than an advantage. A single case will serve to 

 illustrate the point. Last year we had some extremely fine 

 fruit from one of the experimental apple orchards. It was 

 sent to Boston and put in cold storage, and when it came time 

 to put it on the market, we sent a young man with experience 

 in packing, to look after it. The fruit was packed in boxes 

 very nicely ; the young man said he didn't think the Oregon 

 people could have done better. 



Our idea was to put this fruit on the high-class market, 

 and the voung man visited the different high-class fruit men 

 and grocers, and in nearly every instance when the proprietors 

 were told that the fruit for sale was grown in ^Massachusetts, 

 they refused even to look at it, saying they preferred to han- 

 dle the Oregon or Washington apples. They said that when 

 their customers ordered a dozen apples they always wanted 

 those from the Pacific coast rather than eastern grown apples, 

 as they knew what they were getting, and knew every apple 

 would be perfect. 



Now, that is the difficulty we have to overcome, and it 

 arises in this way. We raise, unfortunately, a large amount of 

 poor fruit. We are right here in the midst of the largest mar- 

 kets in the world, and if a man has a barrel of windfalls, or 

 fruit he has knocked olT with his pole, he puts this fruit on 

 the market as Massachusetts or Connecticut apples and we all 

 get our share of the blame for it. Whereas the Oregon and 

 Washington growers are so far away from the market that they 

 know it is not good business to send to the market any but the 

 very best of their fruit. Consequently consumers imagine they 

 produce nothing but the very choicest of fruit, and their fruit 

 is correspondingly popular. 



If we could place ourselves in the same position and real- 

 ize that every time we put a box or barrel of poor fruit on 

 the market we hurt ourselves, and our neighbor as well, we 

 would stop doing it and stop it at once. 



