86 COOPERATIVE MARKETING 



to the uninjured growers to sell these culls as the output 

 of the association, even if they are all put into low grades. 

 With frost the difficulty used to be much more serious. 

 A few oranges of a man's crop might have been frozen 

 and the vast majority have remained sound, but as there 

 was then no way to distinguish the good from the bad 

 except by cutting the fruit the entire crop would have to 

 be condemned. 



Happily, however, a separator has recently been perfected 

 which infallibly detects the frozen fruit, and there is no 

 longer any reason for rejecting a grower's crop as a whole. 

 Since a member of an association usually has no other pack- 

 ing connections, the association will pack, if he so orders, 

 rejected fruit of any kind for a member at a fixed charge 

 a box and allow him to try to dispose of it on his own 

 account. The association's name must in no case be used 

 in connection with such shipments. As a result, since few 

 growers could command the machinery necessary to ship 

 on their own account and as it probably would not be profit- 

 able anyway, most fruit rejected at the house finds its way 

 to the dump or is sold at very low rates to peddlers who 

 sell it in the cities. 



Owing to the system of pooling ordinarily adopted by 

 citrus associations accurate bookkeeping becomes very im- 

 portant. At present there is a movement on foot which 

 contemplates a uniform system of accounts for all the asso- 

 ciations within the exchange. Such a step is wise, as no 

 local individuality would be lost and complete comparability 

 among all the houses would be gained. Then if the show- 

 ing of any house was not up to par, the members could 

 know at once either that the manager was incompetent or 

 that their own cultural methods were at fault. The asso- 

 ciations do not try to surround with secrecy either their 

 methods or the results obtained. A member is at liberty 



