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for the commission houses: Every commission house, unless it is limited 

 to a certain price, does its whole duty when it gets the full market 

 price for fruit consigned to it, whether the price be 2 cents or 5. Now, 

 incidentally, I am going to say something with regard to cooperation: 

 and that is, that without cooperation there can be no concentration of 

 these various supplies of fruit throughout the State. Without coopera- 

 tion fruit cannot be placed in a position so that advances can be made 

 on it and it can be held until there is an opportunity to sell it for 

 something like a reasonable price. Without cooperation it must 

 be sold at such prices as will tend to break the market. Without 

 cooperation it must be sold by promiscuous consignments. Take, 

 for instance, the outlook for next year. Instead of raising from 

 800 to 1,000 carloads of prunes we may raise 2,000. Suppose we are 

 able to sell 800 in the early part of the season, and there are left 1,200. 

 If we should put one half of these, or 600 carloads, on the market, we 

 may reasonably expect that the price of the four sizes of prunes will not 

 be above 2| or 3 cents in the Eastern market, and that the class of fruit 

 named in the dispatch which I have read to you will be absolutely 

 worthless, because the other will be so cheapened that no person will 

 think of buying it at any price. I think concentration through our fruit 

 exchanges and through our drying associations will avert this threatened 

 calamity very largely. 



Mr. Motheral: I would like to ask this gentleman how many car- 

 loads of prunes are sent out from this State annually. 



Col. Hersey: Last year there were 55,000,000 pounds produced on 

 the Pacific Coast, which made over 2,200 cars. This year there will be 

 not to exceed 1,000 or 1,200. 



Mr. Adams: Five hundred and eighty-two had gone on the 15th of 

 this month. 



Col. Hersey: I can say this, that in our valley, which has raised by 

 far the largest quantity of prunes of any locality in the State, we figured 

 that, up to the 3d of November of last year, there were 587 carloads 

 shipped in excess of what were shipped this year up to that date. And 

 we have on hand in our valley less than half as much, after this small 

 shipment, than we had last year at the same time. 



Mr. Motheral: I asked the question for the purpose of instituting 

 a comparison between the prune product and the raisin product. 

 There has been nothing said, so far as I have heard, upon the subject of 

 cooperation in the raisin interest, in which Fresno, Tulare, Kings, and 

 Kern Counties are interested. Last year our vineyards were not all in 

 full bearing, and we sent out 3,900 carloads from the State. This amount, 

 at $1,000 per carload, which is about what it brings, would aggre- 

 gate somewhere between $4,000,000 and $6,000,000. This is one of 

 the great fruit industries of California, and we have had more trouble 

 in handling it than has been met with in perhaps any other kind of 

 fruit. The trouble is because we cannot get the raisin producers to 

 understand the importance of cooperation, to understand the necessity 

 of standing together and pooling their interests. We have had a class 

 of men there called commission brokers. A great many of the farmers 

 need money to enable them to pick their crops and to dry them. They 

 need money to pay their taxes; they need money in their business, 

 and they can't wait until the raisins are sold to get this money. The 

 raisin brokers start out in May and the growers sell their crops to 



