18 BULLETIN 274, U. 8. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
desirability and advantage of high quality are unquestioned. Much 
can be done in training to reduce the liability to injury, especially at 
harvest time. It is customary to cut out the greater portion of the 
nonbearing wood, leaving only sufficient to allow for a good selection 
of canes for next year. The remaining nonbearing canes are often- 
times sorted out from the others and tied to a separate wire in order 
to facilitate picking. This enables the pickers to get at the berries 
more easily, lessens the liability of leaving berries that should be 
picked, and makes it possible to do the picking with more care. 
THE LABOR PROBLEM. 
The fact that much of the picking is done by help which has had 
no previous experience necessitates a great deal of painstaking work 
on the part of the grower and foreman in instructing the pickers in 
proper methods and in seeing that they follow instructions. Until the 
labor becomes thoroughly trained the picking may be anything but 
that desired or necessary for the best results. A great many of the 
pickers are children, and it is almost impossible to impress upon them 
the reason or necessity for careful handling and to imbue them with 
the proper feeling of responsibility. Aside from other considerations, 
the fact that the pickers are paid almost entirely on the basis of 
quantity makes the problem of securing proper care in handling even 
more difficult. 
HANDLING, AN ECONOMIC PROBLEM. 
The problem of handling is one of great economic importance and 
equally as momentous as that of growing. The fullest measure of 
success can come only to those who, after producing the finest fruit 
possible, successfully solve the problem of handling so as to insure 
the maximum carrying quality of the fruit. To overcome the losses 
in transit and to broaden the marketing territory are strictly business 
propositions related to methods of organizing the berry business, to 
systems of hiring labor, to methods of picking, hauling, and ship- 
ping, to methods of inspection at receiving sheds, and to the proper 
utilization of precooling and refrigeration. Any system of handling 
that puts a premium on quantity and not quality must necessarily be 
detrimental to the best interests of the industry. 
CAREFUL-HANDLING EXPERIMENTS. 
During the season of 1911 and 1912 a series of careful-handling 
experiments was made in order to determine the relation of the 
methods of handling to the decay and deterioration of red raspberries 
in transit and after arrival on the market. Each lot or series con- 
sisted of a number of carefully handled crates of raspberries with 
the same number of comparable commercially handled crates from 
the same yard and picked at the same time. During the season of 
1911 it was found impracticable to make shipments, and therefore 
all lots were held in a fully iced refrigerator car, from which fruit 
was withdrawn after lapses of time representing transit periods of 
four, six, and eight days, respectively. The percentages of decay 
& 
