THIRTY-THIRD BIENNIAL SESSION 
227 
MARKETS AND MARKETING PROBLEMS. 
Charles J. Brand, Washington, D. C. 
Mr. Coulter said a thing which appealed to me as an independent orchard- 
ist, namely, that an orchardist ought to have position and facilities for 
borrowing over a longer time. With some friends I am developing an 
orchard, and the amount of money that it takes every month convinces me 
that he is exactly right — we ought to have at least ten years’ time. But on 
that specific problem I think that we need just as much information about 
the growing of fruit as we need money help. In other words, it occurs to 
me that if any person with sufficient means to make a beginning were to 
have facilities for borrowing on ten years’ credit we would have a lot of 
very questionable orchard schemes, I am afraid. I know a lot of people 
would like to start an orchard and if they could borrow money on ten years’ 
credit they would do it. 
Fruit growing is probably the most scientifically conducted of all our 
agricultural industries. In no branch of farming does the information 
which the chemist and the botanist and the pathologist and the entomologist 
secure find such a wide use. Tn fact, this information is now very well 
disseminated, considering the lack of the application of science in other 
farming industries. 
I think there are three points on which the farmer, and I think the 
fruit grower especially, needs help. The first is the widest possible dissem- 
ination of information concerning the growing and handling of the crops. 
The second is short-time credit, to which Dr. Coulter alluded, credit which 
will carry him from one producing season to another, or nearly to another — 
perhaps if it took him all the way through to the next season it would lead 
to speculation. Third, he needs assistance in the establishment of a market- 
ing system which will return to the producer a fair value for his product 
after handling charges, legitimate profits of middlemen, and other neces- 
sary and legitimate expenses have been subtracted. The fruit industry, as 
I indicated above, is not so much in need of help on the production side. 
Financing facilities will be a distinct help, but the real problem of the 
present day is not the production of more fruit, or even in a large sense 
of better fruit, but the problem is one of marketing what is produced suc- 
cessfully. I do not want to leave that statement wholly unqualified, be- 
cause I do think we need to give more attention to varieties — but chiefly 
in the direction of cutting down the number that we grow. That is tied 
up with one of the most fundamentally important propositions related to 
marketing, namely, the promulgation of grades and standards and their pro- 
jection into use. With such a multiplicity of varieties, not only of apples 
and peaches and all such fruit, but of cotton and wheat and other products 
that are being grown at this time, standardization, both as to quality and 
packing, is an exceedingly difficult proposition. Hence I say we need to 
reduce, and we need to focus somewhat upon certain varieties and special- 
ize in them more than we do. 
