20 ' BULLETIN 274, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



can be done in training to reduce the liability to injury, especially at 

 harvest time. It is customary to cut out the greater portion of the 

 nonbearing wood, leaving only sufficient to allow for a good selection 

 of canes for next year. The remaining nonbearing canes are often- 

 times sorted out from the others and tied to a separate wire in order 

 to facilitate picking. This enables the pickers to get at the berries 

 more easily, lessens the liability of leaving berries that should be 

 picked, and makes it possible to do the picking with more care. 



THE LABOR PROBLEM. 



The fact that much of the picking is done by help which has had 

 no previous experience necessitates a great deal of painstaking work 

 on the part of the grower and foreman in instructing the pickers in 

 proper methods and in seeing that they follow instructions. Until the 

 labor becomes thoroughly trained the picking may be anything but 

 that desired or necessary for the best results. A great many of the 

 pickers are children, and it is almost impossible to impress upon them 

 the reason or necessity for careful handling and to imbue them with 

 the proper feeling of responsibility. Aside from other considerations, 

 the fact that the pickers are paid almost entirely on the basis of 

 quantity makes the problem of securing proper care in handling even 

 more difficult. 



HANDLING, AN ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 



The problem of handling is one of great economic importance and 

 equally as momentous as that of growing. The fullest measure of 

 success can come only to those who, after producing the finest fruit 

 possible, successfully solve the problem of handling so as to insure 

 the maximum carrying quality of the fruit. To overcome the losses 

 in transit and to broaden the marketing territory are strictly business 

 propositions related to methods of organizing the berry business, to 

 systems of hiring labor, to methods of picking, hauling, and ship- 

 ping, to methods of inspection at receiving sheds, and to the proper 

 utilization of precooling and refrigeration. Any system of handling 

 that puts a premium on quantity and not quality must necessarily be 

 detrimental to the best interests of the industry. 



CAREFUL-HANDLING EXPERIMENTS. 



During the season of 1911 and 1912 a series of careful-handling 

 experiments was made in order to determine the relation of the 

 methods of handling to the decay and deterioration of red raspberries 

 in transit and after arrival on the market. Each lot or series con- 

 sisted of a number of carefully handled crates of raspberries with 

 the same number of comparable commercially handled crates from 

 the same yard and picked at the same time. During the season of 



