142 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
$60.00 per acre, while the figures I have 
collected and which might bear shading a 
little, although I assure you they are con¬ 
scientious, are a little higher. 
There is one other thing I should men¬ 
tion, merely for the purpose of calling 
your attention to it, and because in all 
probability we have all thought of it. 
The other day a man had a box of King 
oranges which he sent to New York, and 
someone paid $18.00 for that box. At 
this season fruit is scarce and it brings 
high prices. A good quality of orange 
brings $5.00 or $6.00 per box. 
I was looking at a map of the United 
States some time ago, a map two or three 
feet square, on which the areas producing 
various articles of food were shaded in 
different colors so that one could see at 
a glance the areas producing corn, cotton, 
wheat, cattle, etc. I looked to see where 
the citrus product area was, and I found 
a little spot away down here on this arm 
pointing into the south seas. Compared 
with the total area it was almost infini¬ 
tesimal, about the size of my thumb. Of 
course, California is a citrus-producing 
area, but the citrus-producing parts of 
the country are comparatively small. If 
you were to take Florida and squeeze out 
all the land that will not produce citrus 
fruit successfully, you will have dimin¬ 
ished the size of Florida by about three- 
fourths. There are thousands and thou¬ 
sands of acres of land in the peninsula 
where the orange tree should never be 
planted. 
And this area where it can be grown 
cannot be extended. And the population 
of the entire country is increasing very 
rapidly and it is growing in wealth and 
they will insist more and more on having 
citrus fruits, and the actual returns from 
these fruits are going to be so satisfactory 
that it will add to the intrinsic value of 
this land that it brings within the juris¬ 
diction of the Farm Loan Bank. 
Let me give you an example of the im¬ 
pression the stability of Florida se¬ 
curities has made upon close and care¬ 
ful and thorough financial investors, by 
alluding to the county in which I live. We 
don’t manufacture anything in our 
county, not even an axe handle. We have 
no factories of any kind. The county is 
given over almost exclusively to the pro¬ 
duction of citrus fruits. It became nec¬ 
essary, we thought, to bond for good 
roads. The county did so, and at the first 
sale of bonds of that county, held a few 
months ago, a great many bond buyers 
investigated the security and bid upon 
those bonds and paid a large premium 
above par for a million and a half of 
bonds carrying 5 per cent interest. 
We thought those roads would be a 
very great thing for the county, and we 
think so yet, and we are rather a restless 
village and want to have the best of every¬ 
thing if we can get it, and so we formed a 
local road and bridge district which em¬ 
braces two townships, and we had a bond 
election and voted $325,000 to pay for 
these rural roads running around our 
lakes. They will be useful and be a beau¬ 
tiful pleasure drive. With that little bond 
issue, in a county which was bonded for 
$1,500,000, these bonds running for thirty 
years, bearing interest at 6 per cent, we 
sold them two weeks ago at a premium 
of $10,075.00. That was a second mort¬ 
gage, you might say. 
