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say it has been. And I will quote from the annual report of 

 the co-operative society for last year: ''Your purchases for the 

 past year have included 575,000 pulp heads, 35,000 pounds of 

 nails, 67,800 pounds of grass and clover seed, 22,745 pounds of 

 other seeds, 48,300 pounds of vetches, 4,500 bushels of seed 

 oats, 2,060 barrels of flour [and they bought a lot more flour 

 just before the war], 19,649 bags of feed, 6,044 tons of fertilizer, 

 104,000 pounds of arsenate of lead, 8,900 rods of steel fence, 

 1,800 barrels of lime sulphur, 2,200 pounds 'Black leaf 40.' 

 These supplies have cost in round figures about $183,000." 



Our country is especially fitted for co-operation, because the 

 Dominion Atlantic Railroad runs from one end of the valley to 

 the other, and the warehouses are dotted all the way from 

 Digby to Yarmouth, and at Berwick we have six more. The 

 central office does all the selling. They get their orders from 

 England, from the Canadian west, or wherever it may be. 

 Each warehouse is notified by telephone or telegraph how many 

 barrels to put into that particular lot. 



The great trouble we had was to get the farmers started. 

 They are a suspicious lot of men, afraid somebody will make 

 a dollar out of them. In Nova Scotia the great talk against 

 the co-operative companies is that the manager is making some 

 money. Of course you can't get a good manager unless you 

 pay him. Last year it cost about 4 cents a barrel for all the 

 apples that w^ere handled by the co-operative company to pay 

 the total running expenses of the whole business for clerks. 

 We have a splendid system of bookkeeping, too. Every man 

 knows what his apples bring, and we have auditors to handle 

 the books so that there is no possibility of fraud, and up to the 

 present date the movement is working very well indeed. Our 

 apples go to Africa, Cape Colony, Glasgow, England and the 

 Canadian west, and we are opening up a market now in South 

 America. We sell very few apples in the United States. 



Question. In what condition are the apples when picked 

 and taken to the warehouse? 



Mr. WooDWORTH. They are picked in the orchard care- 

 fully, and the early apples taken to the warehouse in barrels 

 with a little bit of burlap and a hoop drawn over it. The later 



