FRUIT REPORTS. 
247 
The citrus industry in nearly every locality where prosecuted has produced, 
is now producing and will continue to produce oranges and lemons equal to 
the best found in any market. Not all of the fruit is of that quality because 
in many instances inferior varieties have been planted, .but these are fast 
being eliminated by budding to varieties of known excellence. Many mis- 
takes have been made by planting too many varieties in one grove— the 
owner whereof had not sufficient fruit of any one kind to make it an object 
for a buyer to take except at a very low price. This error has largely been 
remedied by rebudding. 
At first it was urged and argued that the budded tree was short lived and 
so firmly had the idea been fixed in many minds that the owner of the first 
twenty acre grove planted in San Diego county, said to me while the ques- 
tion was being discussed, ‘‘A seedling grove may reasonably be expected 
to be in its prime 800 years from planting, while the budded grove cannot 
be expected to live more than 400 years, so I will not plant budded trees.” 
He has passed over— and the grove after being almost valueless for twenty- 
five years is now all transformed to Washington Navels, and this is only 
one of many instances. 
All of this has been expensive but it shows progress. 
It is but a few years since the first car load of oranges was shipped from 
this State and from that small beginning the exported product has reached 
fifteen thousand (15,000) car loads in a single year. 
The unprecedented drought of the past two years has reduced the quantity 
exported and has postponed the planting of a vast acreage to citrus fruits— 
especially is this true of the present season. 
The citrus fruit grower of California has many difficulties to encounter 
which are unknown to his Mediterranean competitor, and which result in 
reducing his profits. Although an import duty of about eighty-five (85) cents 
per box is charged against the foreign product, yet this is more than offset 
by difference in transportation to the same market and to this difference must 
be added the difference in the cost of labor required in cultivation, irriga- 
tion, and every process required in preparing the fruit for market. 
In the Mediterranean country the common day laborer is paid from nine 
(9) to (about twenty (20) cents per day, while with us he is paid from $1.25 to 
$1.50 per day. Must our labor be degraded to Mediterranean prices? Yet 
there are compensations for this disparity, in our improved methods and 
machinery as well as in the more elevated character of the laborer. 
The California grower of citrus fruits has yet many things to learn before 
he will lay his fruit down in first class condition in markets more than three 
thousand miles distant, by rail transportation. Prominent among them is, 
careful handling of the fruit from the moment it is cut from the tree until 
it is loaded into the car for market, and after that, the absolute control of 
temperature in the car until its arrival at destination, and its immediate 
marketing. If the average grower would carefully consider all these things 
and then act upon them, I have no doubt that seventy-five per cent of the 
average loss by “breaking down” of fruit, would be avoided. 
The prayers of every fruit grower on the Pacific coast are never ceasing 
that Congress will authorize the building of the Nicaragua canal by the 
government at the earliest moment possible — then will have arrived a time 
of such phenomenal development of fruit growing and such a reduction in 
eastern market cost that the poorest paid artisan or laborer may have on 
his table daily, luxuries, which are now seldom, if ever, tasted. 
