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



other citrus fruits, only 20,000 boxes shy of a million, and weighing 

 68,000,000 pounds. This record of increase has been paralleled at 

 Pomona, Ontario, Redlands, and other citrus centers, not to include the 

 remarkable development at Riverside, which is yet producing one 

 hundred per cent more fruit than any other section, bringing the total 

 output for 1901 up to 21,175 carloads of oranges alone. The world has 

 never before witnessed the concentration of so much capital, energy, 

 and enterprise upon an equal area of agricultural lands in the space of 

 one decade as that lavished with so much success upon the citrus 

 territory of Southern California. 



Ten years ago the orange industry was fairly in its experimental 

 •stage; ten years ago began the great increase in population that gave to 

 Los Angeles City front rank in percentage of gain of all the important 

 .cities of this country, and to every citrus-growing center a population 

 far outstripping Los Angeles in percentage of gain, though not appear- 

 ing in the returns from lack of data with which to make comparisons. 

 It is more than coincident that these developments of soil and popula- 

 tion should mark time together. The former could not proceed without 

 the latter, iii the orange business, for it required increased labor to 

 maintain the intense cultivation and harvest the product that produced 

 this record. The orange should be recognized, then, as the cardinal 

 factor in the development of Southern California from the census- 

 enumerator's standpoint. 



We are told that Belgian fruit culture is more intensive than that of 

 any other portion of the world. Indeed, I know of nothing so intensive 

 in this country, except the cultivation of the Belgian hare in Southern 

 California two years ago, in which we had a monopoly, until the 

 demand became so brisk in the north that our profitable hutches were 

 depleted at a cost of from $5 to $150 per hare. Nothing has proven 

 more lucrative than the intensive cultivation of the hare or the orange, 

 except that of resistant grapevines at 75 cents a cutting, and you may 

 look upon it as a law of compensation that what the north lost on 

 hares will soon be regained on vines, and we play even in the honors of 

 intensely cultivating each other in the promotion of these two great 

 industries. But this digression prevented me from setting forth the fact 

 that were it not for the use of modern methods of irrigation, economy 

 in the use of machinery in cultivation, and labor-saving appliances in 

 preparing the crops for marketing, the orange-growing centers would 

 present a duplicate of the Netherlands in the rural population necessary 

 to produce and care for the present fruit tonnage. I have known one 

 acre of orange trees to produce 70,000 pounds of merchantable fruit at 

 one picking. No cultivated crop that I have seen is equal to that of a 

 thoroughly cared-for orchard of Washington Navel oranges. Twenty 

 thousand pounds of corn and potatoes, grown at the same time upon an 



