23° 
AMERICAN POMOLOGICAE SOCIETY 
Our Transportation Practices are Bad. 
In the matter of transportation we have a very bad way of carting our 
farm products about the country, hit or miss, and it would seem sometimes 
running up a frieght bill which takes off all the profit there could possibly 
be in handling the product. An interesting case of this came to my at- 
tention a few weeks ago in Chicago, and it relates to a shipment of livestock. 
The stock was originally from Texas — calves were born in Texas. They 
spent their first winter in South Dakota, then they were taken to Omaha 
and from there reshipped to Wisconsin. In November, a year ago this 
month, they were shipped to Sioux City, getting right back into the Omaha 
territory, and a feeder in southern Minnesota took them up to his farm and 
kept them there ninety days. They were loaded again and shipped to 
Chicago (I guess they knew Chicago by heart by this time) and were bought 
by an Ohio feeder for summer grazing. My informant told me about this 
in September, and they were at that time still feeding on Ohio grass. By 
this time they have probably been back to Chicago again, on their last sad 
journey, and may even be on their way back to Texas in refrigerator cars. 
It illustrates the lack of direction which our whole system of marketing and 
distribution faces at the present time. 
Now that is not an isolated case; it is a good average case. Much of 
our cattle industry is conducted that way. With fruit, conditions are not 
quite so bad, but there are similar problems. For instance, the fruit and 
truck grower in the Mesilla valley, who should find a regular and easy and 
profitable outlet, say in El Paso, cannot grow fruit or vegetables in the 
average year at a profit. They are practically driven out of it, and for this 
reason: California shipments headed for overstocked markets are diverted 
and put on the El Paso market, at a price with which the local producer 
cannot compete. We need to develop a system of production nearer to our 
market centers. 
I was in Portland, Maine, day before yesterday. I went up, among other 
things, to speak to the pomological society of the State of Maine. Maine 
has very good apples, but along Congress street I visited a number of gro- 
ceries and fruit concerns, and found that a greater number were offering 
Western fruit than Maine fruit. In other words, they, the middlemen, find 
it to their advantage, because of our poorly-knitted system, to sell Cali- 
fornia products instead of home-grown products. Problems in this matter 
are very difficult, for the trouble is very deep-seated ; but we must make a be- 
ginning somewhere to uproot such conditions. 
Other transportation problems with which you are familiar and which 
need study, and conditions which need correction, relate to the movement of 
refrigerator, heated and ventilated cars; routings; education of producers 
as to the privileges of diversion which they may enjoy; a study of demurrage 
with its reference to fruit movement. At the present time it is so much 
cheaper to keep a refrigerator car on the track and use it as a storage ware- 
house, than it is to unload it, that not infrequently fruit-growing sections 
go without cars when the terminal side-tracks are filled with them. Those 
of you who are peach growers know that the minimum car-lot regulations 
are burdensome; that if a car of peaches, the ordinary refrigerator car, is 
