Tropical Fruits 
R. L. Goodwin 
Mr. President and friends: 
I am the only one on the committee 
that is present. I thought some time ago 
it would be impossible for me to be pres¬ 
ent at this meeting, and I depended upon 
the rest of the Committee to furnish pa¬ 
pers upon tropical fruits and pineapples. 
Fortunately, I found my way clear to 
come and here I am, and will tell you 
what I know. 
Many of you, as you came down the 
East Coast, saw the pineapples, and they 
looked bad. But I want to assure you 
they are not all dead. Probably 60 per 
pent of the crop has been lost from the 
effect of the freeze, and possibly another 
20 per cent has been lost from the effects 
of our prolonged drought. From thirty- 
five acres, I expect to ship somewhere in 
the neighborhood of 1500 crates. The 
fields that have been taken care of, that 
have been well fertilized, will give a minF 
mum crop. The fields that have not been 
taken care of, will in all probability, be 
abandoned. The good fields will yield a 
good fall crop and next season a full crop. 
In 1909, from the East Coast we ship¬ 
ped over one million crates of pineapples. 
Last year, I believe we shipped less than 
200,000. The industry has been gradu¬ 
ally declining from 1909 to the present 
time. 
There is more than one cause for this; 
one, the increased cost of fertilizer, crate 
material, labor, etc. You cannot run a 
pineapple plantation without fertilizing it 
heavily. 
Various problems have come up since 
1909, and among them is a diseased con¬ 
dition, or insect; in fact we do not know 
what it is but we call it wilt. There is 
a condition where the plants thrive for a 
while and then the leaves wilt and the 
plants fail to give a crop. 
About three years ago, the wilt became 
alarming, and we took it up with the Ex¬ 
periment Station at Gainesville. They 
sent some of their scientific men down 
and their investigations have resulted in 
finding that the roots are affected with 
nematodes—root knot. How we are 
going to continue in the pineapple busi¬ 
ness and get rid of this trouble, is a ques¬ 
tion. 
I have pineapples that were planted in 
1892, that have borne for twenty-four 
years in succession, and are in fairly 
good condition. I have been applying 
plenty of fertilizer to them. 
It seems to me we have tried to make 
the ground produce for entirely too long 
a period. We have exhausted the ele¬ 
ments of fertility in the soil, and we do 
not know what to do with the land 
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