The Commercial Possibilities of Florida Fruit 
I 
Products 
Miss A. Webster, State College for Women, Tallahassee 
Production without conservation is like 
a foundation without the house. Since 
the days of the ancients people have made 
use of two types of conservation, first 
that of marketing the fresh product, and 
second, that of preserving it before plac¬ 
ing it on the market. Too often, the 
Florida grower employs only the first 
method in disposing of his crop. Statis¬ 
tics show that Florida exported $80,000- 
000 worth of food products last year and 
in return brought back $70,000,000 worth 
of these same products, a large per cent 
of which might have been produced with¬ 
in our own boundaries. And, more sur¬ 
prising than the knowledge that they 
might have been produced, is the fact that 
a large part of them were produced, and 
then allowed to go to waste. 
Reliable authority states that some¬ 
times as much as ten per cent of the prod¬ 
ucts delivered to the packing house are 
discarded as culls. This loss sometimes 
measures the difference between profit¬ 
able and unprofitable production. Prod¬ 
ucts known as culls are. often so called 
only because of an external defect that 
does not injure their value for table or 
canning purposes. Year after year Flor¬ 
ida walks by her own packing houses, 
where these culls lie, on her way to buy 
similar products put up in containers in 
other states, to distribute to her own peo¬ 
ple. 
A visit to three grocery stores in as 
many localities in the State revealed the 
fact that only one Georgia and two Flor¬ 
ida firms were represented on the list of 
some seventy-five different factories 
whose fruit products found their way 
into the homes in the State. A visit of 
this kind is like a tour of America. From 
Washington with her loganberry fields 
and apple orchards, down the Pacific to 
the home of the famous Sunkist fruits, 
across the Rockies to Chicago, St. Louis 
and New York, with their factories to 
which center systems of transportation 
lined with carriers of fresh fruits and 
vegetables and from which radiate, car 
loads of containers that find their way 
into all sections of the country. A closer 
inspection of these shelves further dis¬ 
closed the fact that all of the products, 
with the exception of apples and cherries, 
could have been put up within our own 
State. 
As unthrifty as the situation looks it 
is not as bad as it has been. About ten 
years ago commercial canning in this 
State developed simultaneously along two 
lines: the home proposition in which in¬ 
dividuals working on a small basis put up 
a fancy product for a fancy price; and 
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