ORGANIZATION OF PRODUCERS 95 



with the sound fruit of others, and when as a consequence 

 of his careless picking the cars in which his fruit goes for- 

 ward show an excessive percentage of decay and are dis- 

 counted by the trade, he does not bear the whole damage of 

 his misdeeds, but it is distributed over the entire member- 

 ship. Indeed, the larger growers, who invariably employ 

 the picking crew, have to assume the bulk of the loss, as 

 their fruit constitutes the majority of the shipments. Thus 

 it seems that control of the actual picking should be dele- 

 gated to the association, for the good of the very grower 

 who objects to it, as well as for that of the others. 



Another reason for having the picking absolutely con- 

 trolled by the house is because oranges cannot be treated 

 as merely so many units of a homogeneous commodity. In 

 most fruit and vegetable industries the large fine specimens 

 bring better prices than the smaller, but this does not hold 

 for oranges. At certain times the trade shows a preference 

 for the larger sizes, and at other times for the medium 

 sizes. With centralized control of picking a manager can 

 watch the market and see what sizes of fruit are command- 

 ing the bestprices. Then he can order his picking foreman 

 to have those sizes selected in a rough way, as the crew 

 goes through a grove. Under individual control a grower 

 has no very definite knowledge about the demands of the 

 market, and simply delivers oranges instead of large 

 oranges or middle sized oranges or whatever will best 

 please the trade. 



Some managers make sizes their specialty and indeed 

 attribute a large proportion of their success to their ability 

 to anticipate what sizes are going to be most in demand at 

 diflferent times in the various markets. A concrete illustra- 

 tion would be something like this: During January and 

 February the New England territory might seem to prefer 

 large fruit (this is actually the case), so the manager figures 



