FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
167 
Pre-cooling is beneficial to all shipments 
when the weather is wrong. 
ACTION OF WATER 
Now what do we mean by wrong 
weather? I have seen strong men in 
tears when the wind was in the east. You 
who grow vegetables know even better 
than do fruit growers that the warm, 
moist winds from the east carry sickness 
to these, products. Fungus and all kinds 
of parasites now appear to add to the 
grower’s risks. Just what happens is the 
very same phenomenon that we reverse 
when pre-cooling. The warm, moist 
winds, blowing over the fields and 
through the packing houses deposit their 
wetness on everything just as the cold dry 
air of the pre-cooler must take up that 
wetness again. 
It is at this point that most of the past 
mistakes have been made in pre-cooling 
and in shipping after pre-cooling. But I 
shall explain. A simple illustration is 
this glass of ice water which you see is 
covered with dew. Now the dew is form¬ 
ing on the surface of the water even fast¬ 
er than it forms on the outside of the 
glass, but the dew on the surface of the 
zvater is dissolved in the water as fast as 
it forms , so it is not seen. Thus the cold 
water drinks up the moisture from the 
air and keeps on drinking it up as long 
as the water is colder than the air. In 
time, if the ice is not fenewed, the water 
will become as warm as the air of the 
room and will cease drinking up the 
moisture from the air. And should some¬ 
thing happen to make the water warmer 
than the air, or the air colder than the 
water, then the water will give back its 
moisture to the air. 
So you see that in a country surround¬ 
ed by the sea and full of lakes and rivers 
with winds blowing from everywhere, 
these changes from damp to dry and from 
dry to damp are constantly recurring. 
What we must do is to see. that they oc¬ 
cur the way we want them to. That is 
what proper refrigeration, properly ap¬ 
plied, enables us to do. 
But we have to keep the principle of the 
evaporating and condensing waters al¬ 
ways in mind from the time we harvest 
until the vegetables or fruit are sold and 
eaten. And when once we commence to 
refrigerate, we. must carry these princi¬ 
ples in mind until the end of the journey 
for we are working with products that 
are colder than the air and that will at¬ 
tract moisture just as this glass of ice 
water. 
Again, while our perishable, is being 
pre-cooled, it is warmer than the air in 
the pre-cooler and consequently is giving 
off its moisture. You can even see it 
steam, clouds of vapor appearing when 
the vegetable or fruit is quite warm. And 
without some provision to take away the 
vapor in the air, it loses its capacity to 
cool as well as to take up moisture be¬ 
cause, to cool freely, the product must 
evaporate. Fast pre-cooling is not only 
better for the product but it requires less 
of an investment in rooms in which to do 
the work, because more fruit is pre-cooled 
in an equal time. There are other sav¬ 
ings due to fast pre-cooling and some 
of them are important. I do not know 
of any advantages of pre-cooling slowly. 
The difference in this respect between 
