54 PROCEEDINGS OF TWENTY-SIXTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 



every grower may know how sales are going day by day. After each 

 sale, the agents remit promptly to the central office, and this then 

 sends to the manager of each local association the individual account 

 sales, with checks for balances due; these, after checking up, he hands 

 to the growers when they next come to deliver fruit. At the close of 

 the season, from the refund paid to it from the central exchange, the 

 local association distributes, in dividends to its members, the money in 

 excess of the amount needed to pay their corporate expenses for the 

 season — a grower's profit, resulting from the economies of cooperation, 

 entirely outside of what they receive from the sale of fruits. 



Every possible effort is made to assist growers who may need tem- 

 porary aid, when this can be extended without risk to the organization- 

 We do not speculate, but undertake to sell the products for the grower 

 with the utmost possible economy and efficiency. 



At present, although we have had a most successful season, we feel 

 that we were able to accomplish but a small part of the good which we 

 hope to see secured by this organization; for so long as thirty or forty 

 different shippers are juggling with five thousand cars of perishable 

 products in a hundred various markets, thousands of miles away, each 

 in utter ignorance of the other's destinations and diversions, there are 

 bound to be most serious market interferences, resulting in some places 

 in gluts with ruinously low prices, and in others in famines which most 

 seriously check consumption, so that the business of growing fruit for 

 Eastern shipment, which should be safely profitable year by year, is 

 now but a gamble. 



By this chaotic way of marketing, at a conservative estimate we come 

 short, at least 20 cents per box, of the average prices which might be 

 obtained were the fruit to be intelligently distributed by a single agency, 

 careful to see that each market is kept supplied up to but not exceeding 

 its capacity for consumption. This would save to the fresh-fruit 

 growers of California a million dollars per year — a comfortable sum this 

 would be for growers to divide, even in this prosperous season. Such a 

 result will easily double the value of every fresh-fruit shipping ranch, 

 and its prosperous tide would be felt in every channel of trade on the 

 Coast. Now, fellow fruit-growers, why not proceed to accomplish this? 

 The cooperative path lies plainly before us. We need but to go forward 

 in it to reach freedom and safety. For years the fresh-fruit growers 

 have been told that the exchange methods which were conceded to be 

 successful in marketing citrus fruit could not be used with fresh fruit. 

 The Fresh Fruit Exchange has this year shown beyond question, in 

 times of good markets and of poor markets — for we had such in the 

 Salway season — that this plan is admirably adapted to fresh -fruit 

 marketing. 



It is true that the friendly business relations existing between many 



