PRECOOLIXG 



25 



This is a very important matter, both with the shipment of 

 lettuce and of citrus fruits and in the shipment or storage of 

 celery. 



The large celery containers that are used in New York 

 State and in California are about two feet square and hold 

 from six to eight dozen plants. In the large cold storage 

 warehouses, there has been a great deal of difficulty in hand- 

 ling celery in these containers, because of decay in the cen- 

 ter of the container. Take a container two feet square, pack 

 the celery tightly in that, and have it hot, load it aboard a 

 car, pack two or three carloads in a cold chamber, and it 

 takes quite a long time for the refrigerating apparatus in 

 that chamber to reduce the temperature to a safe point. When 

 the celery is stacked up five tiers high, as it is in these ware- 

 houses, you can readily see that it takes a long time to get 

 the latent heat out of these containers. Observation shows 

 that decay takes place in the center of such containers. If 

 the celery could be cooled before it is packed to a point where 

 there was a lessened task placed upon the cold storage ap- 

 paratus, a safe temperature could be reached much more 

 quickly than under present conditions. 



I believe in that respect we can be of great assistance to 

 the cold storage people by precooling and by adopting a differ- 

 ent type of container. A little preliminaiy work which has 

 been done in this state indicates that a different type of con- 

 tainer from the one usually used for handling celery will 

 carry it for a considerably increased period. The substitu- 

 tion of the Florida crate for the standard crate which is used 

 in New York and in California will undoubtedly be of very 

 great advantage to those who store celery. This crate, as 

 you know, is really a half crate. The Florida crate is about 

 half as large as the standard New York and California crate 

 and carries about four dozen plants, sometimes five. This is a 

 thin crate. It is about ten or eleven inches thick, as com- 

 pared with the standard crate, which is twenty-two or twenty- 

 four inches. The result is, when those are placed in storage 

 and proper arrangements provided for slatting the crates so 

 cold air can come in among them, we have, so to speak, more 

 outside plants in the small crates than in the large crates; 



