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The trees in Fort Valley district are pruned to form low heads, 

 and when the fruit is ripe and the trees well loaded, the branches 

 bend down and the fruit is picked from the ground. Colored labor 

 is the help that is largely depended upon for picking, and in some 

 cases for packing, and also for loading the cars. In Mr. Hale's 

 orchard, at the time I visited it, there were about lOO college stu- 

 dents employed, most of them from the University of Georgia. 

 Many such boys work in the packing houses and are paid in such a 

 manner that those who do well are encouraged to stay and by the 

 time the main crop comes on most of the poor packers have left. 



Mr. Hale employs a ticket system to determine the amount of 

 work done by each picker and grader, and when these tickets are 

 checked up at the end of each day, the superintendent has a record 

 of how many baskets each grader has handled, and how many 

 baskets each girl and each man has picked. I tried the ticket 

 system in the harvesting of our fruit in our experiment orchard 

 at Vineland and found it a very good plan. Each picker had a 

 card, and during the first day's picking, a basket of fruit reached 

 the packing table which was too green, and by referring to the card 

 in the basket we found it had been picked by No. 17. A little later 

 another basket was found with the fruit somewhat green and the 

 ticket showed picker No. 17. It was only necessary to shout out to 

 the orchard foreman that No. 17 was picking the fruit too green. 

 The man in charge of the packing house can tell exactly what sort 

 of work each picker is doing. This system also seemed to bring out 

 some rivalry among the pickers to see which could pick the most. 

 We had one man as a picker who was a school teacher, and when the 

 records were footed up each day we found that our school teacher 

 was picking more peaches than any of the Italian pickers. 



I was somewhat surprised to find that most of the colored la- 

 borers at Fort Valley seemed to receive practically as high wages as 

 the Italian labor we have in southern New Jersey. I found some of 

 the colored laborers at Mr. Hale's very bright. In taking a photo- 

 graph of several men loading peaches upon a wagon, one of them re- 

 marked, "Look out boss, don't take my feet or you won't have no 

 picture." 



One of the important things in packing a Georgia carrier is 

 to have it full enough to give the cover a noticeable bulge, a point 

 which the amateur packer often fails to get onto. 



I want to bring up one or two suggestions with regard to the 

 expenses of marketing peaches from various points. The distance 

 from Fort Valley, Ga., is eleven or twelve hundred miles. The 

 freight by the carload is about 55^ cents, the cost of icing would be 

 about 16 cents, and cartage in New York about 5 cents. An empty 

 crate in Georgia will cost not less than 15 cents, when nailing, label- 

 ing, etc., is considered. Compare these expenses with those from 

 Vineland, New Jersey, to New York. Distance to New York, about 

 one hundred miles ; freight 14 cents ; cartage 5 cents. The crates, 

 if new ones purchased from eastern dealers, might cost 20 cents, but 



