MARKETING BROOM CORN. 29 



through the car door, men with hooks place the bales at either end 

 of the car. On these are placed a second tier, until the car has 

 been filled. For a 36- foot car, 64 to 72 bales are required, depend- 

 ing on the size of the bales. Care is necessary in handling bales 

 not cross-tied to avoid pulling the end wires off, thus injuring their 

 appearance or making reconditioning necessary at destination. 



At more extensive shipping points there is usually constructed on 

 a sidetrack a platform the top of which is even with the floor of 

 the car. The broom corn when hauled by farmers is dumped on 

 the platform and trucked into the cars. This method saves much 

 labor and permits loading with less damage to the bales. Where 

 warehouses are available, the bales are weighed and tagged when 

 unloaded and are either stored or trucked into the cars from the 

 platform. 



Fig. 5. — Loading cars with broom corn from wagons at country shipping points. 

 CHANNELS OF TRAFFIC. 



While the general movement from producing to consuming points 

 is more or less fixed, there are no regular channels through which 

 the broom corn of any particular crop may be expected to move, 

 the destination depending entirely on who purchases it. For ex- 

 ample, a firm in the East may want annually 100 cars of a certain kind 

 of brush. One season it may have been obtained in Illinois while the 

 next year Oklahoma may have produced the kind desired, or per- 

 haps it could be obtained from the Rio Grande Valley to better ad- 

 vantage. Again, certain large contracts for brooms may have been 

 secured by firms in Chicago one year and in Baltimore the next. 

 Thus it is seen that the movement may be entirely different from 

 year to year. 



