PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-SIXTH FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 



17 



broad distribution for all our products, and remove all adverse elements 

 from the business of fruit growing except those of dishonest packing 

 and branding. "We should have still to face a most formidable peril, 

 and (me that would finally cause the downfall of our greatest soil enter- 

 prise. So great is the movement toward community uprightness in 

 packing and branding our orchard products that it is unnecessary to 

 state in detail the abuses against which is now mobilizing this great 

 force of reformation. Nor can I trace now gradually and through 

 the stress of bitter experience the orchardists are coming to the conclu- 

 sion that fruit growing is a business as well as an occupation; that 

 sense and discrimination in marketing are as essential as success in the 

 production of superior fruit and greater tonnage. Nor is it necessary 

 to remind this intelligent audience that the new movement of business 

 introspection is a part of the great moral uplift in business throughout 

 the country. It is sufficient that this movement to standardize and 

 honestly brand our fruit products has its foundation in commercial 

 common sense, and its hope in the declaration of our leading growers 

 that an enemy is in their own camp wearing the livery of horticulture 

 and producing qualities of fruit and enforcing methods of packing that 

 has imperiled the Avhole business. 



LAND BOOMING. 



In discussing the economics of horticulture I have held that sufficient 

 attention is not given to the more obscure influences that have an 

 adverse effect upon fruit growing. Yet, for the very reason that an 

 element is insidious, it may be the most dangerous. I am aware that I 

 am now coming upon dangerous ground, for, unfortunately, there is 

 no clear-cut line between legitimate and fraudulent land booming. 

 Some land schemes are neither honest nor bogus, but in effect are cer- 

 tainly not for the best interests of the State. If they could all be made 

 absolutely fair, or absolutely dishonest, or half straight and the other 

 class crooked, there would be less trouble, for the law would handle the 

 latter, and the public could masticate the former without distress. It 

 is the insidious class that is dangerous. Few will allow themselves to 

 be bitten by a rattler, but no one pays much attention to the bite of a 

 mosquito. So it is that our growers will fight blights, and scales, and 

 worms, and yet pay no attention to certain influences at work much 

 more destructively than insect pests. Suppose one could segregate the 

 acreage of orchards and vineyards now being hopelessly and indiffer- 

 ently farmed and tally it all on one sheet. It would be a vast com- 

 munity of alleged growers who had been induced to go into the business 

 through roseate promise and extravagant claim, largely the victims of 

 their own inadvertence and the disinterested promotion of the land 

 seller. Hundreds of promoters are engaged in sugar-coating poor land 

 with grapes, and oiling inferior soil with eucalyptus to make them 

 SAvallow easily to the investor. This insidious practice is permeating 

 many of our fruit industries, and it makes honest and efficient fruit 

 growing realize that there is something wrong with it. but as yet it 

 seems to have failed to locate the obscure point of infection. 



If you think the virus of land speculation is not poisoning the horti- 

 cultural interests of the State, go to some prominent section given to 



2 — FGC 



