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TWENTY-EIGHTH FRUIT- GROWERS 5 CONVENTION. 



to the Exchange, more than feventy-five shippers of citrus fruits out of 

 California. No one of the seventy-five knew what the others were 

 doing. Each of the seventy-five was striving for the best market. 

 Generally each of them knew about as much as the others, and if any 

 market was fairly good, everybody made a plunge for that market, and 

 the market that was best immediately became the poorest in many cases. 

 It is not necessary for me to go at length into a discussion of these points; 

 you are familiar with them; you know to a certain extent what it means. 

 But let me give you a significant illustration of it. By-and-by I will speak 

 to you of a later organization, which took effect on the first of April of 

 this year, and when that organization took charge of the marketing 

 business of the various factors that merged into it, everybody had more 

 or less fruit unsold in the markets, and this was all put together for the 

 purpose of clearing the atmosphere, and it was found that in a single 

 city one of these shippers, and not the largest of the lot, either, had 

 forty-five cars of fruit on the sidetracks, a good deal of it badly decayed. 

 Now, this was only one of quite a considerable number of shippers who 

 combined in this organization, and, as I have said, it was not the largest 

 by any. means. But it illustrates the condition of things. Everybody 

 had a lot of fruit on the sidetracks in that city. Hundreds of cars 

 were there at that time unsold, and all of them weighting down the 

 market; all of them, or a large proportion of them, more or less decayed 

 and becoming weaker every minute and depressing the market every 

 minute more and more. As I have said, everybody operating on his 

 own account, everybody struggling to get his fruit disposed of, everybody 

 hunting the man who would buy a car of fruit, and the man who had 

 any disposition to buy a car of fruit knew that there were a vast number 

 of cars on the sidetrack and he was in no hurry. The holder of it 

 would be quite as anxious to-morrow as he was to-day, and the prices 

 would surely not go up over night. So that the shipper was at the 

 mercy of the buyer and at the mercy of his competitor, and the growers 

 were at the mercy of them all. 



Now, I have not overdrawn the picture. This is a circumstance that 

 is familiar to everybody who has ever attempted to market a perishable 

 product, whether it was fruit or something else. I have perhaps suffi- 

 ciently traced the history of these undertakings. They were to a certain 

 extent successful. When the product was limited and the demand was 

 strong, the fruit could be sold at a fair price. When the product 

 increased and became large and was a little weak in itself, in its carry- 

 ing qualities, or for any other reason, the markets were sluggish and the 

 prices were low. And of course, since our product was steadily increas- 

 ing, since we had more and more from year to year, with every prospect 

 of very much more in the near future, the problem became serious as to 

 what was to become of our citrus fruit industry. Out of those condi- 



