Going in Partnership With Nature 
W. E. Sexton, Vero 
Mr. Floyd has given me the subject of 
“Packing and Shipment of Citrus Fruit.” 
Why Mr. Floyd continues to put me on 
the program when he knows that I have 
only been in your State for seven years, 
to attempt to talk on a subject to men 
who have been living here for 25 and 30 
years is something I cannot tell. 
I do not pretend to know much about 
packing or shipment of citrus fruit, so 
you will please bear with me while I take 
up my lot of time on this program. I 
will try to make this talk as short as pos¬ 
sible. I feel like a “tender-foot” when I 
get among you men who have had many 
years of experience. While I am grow¬ 
ing some fruit and have a packing house 
at Vero, yet I am always conscious of my 
ignorance on certain lines of this work 
and it was never brought so forcibly be¬ 
fore me until last winter when one of the 
old “hard-boiled” growers in our county 
who had successfully out-guessed most of 
the buyers of citrus fruit for the past five 
or six years, sent word for me to come 
and buy his fruit. I have a man who 
works with me in the buying of fruit and 
picking and when I called on this “hard- 
boiled” customer I took my field man 
with me. We looked over the grove very 
carefully and after getting his idea of 
prices and number of boxes on the differ¬ 
ent groves we could tell from our own 
estimates that this man had planned a fine 
trimming for us should we have taken the 
fruit at his figures. This we did not do 
and the next day, in talking to one of my 
friends this gentleman said, “I would like 
to know why that big tender-foot brought 
that d- little ‘cracker’ with him.” 
However, I believe that I have been 
able to get up some information in the 
past two years of operating our packing 
house, which might be of interest to the 
growers who are selling their fruit. First 
I want all the people who are actually 
growing citrus fruit to hold up their right 
hand. Now, I want the people who are 
selling fruit on the trees to hold up 
their right hand. Now, I would like to 
ask a few of these gentlemen who are 
selling fruit on the trees what percentage 
of their fruit grades fancy, what percent¬ 
age goes in the second grade, what per¬ 
centage in the third and what percentage 
in the plain. For your own information 
we have shipped during the past year, up 
until the time I had these figures pre¬ 
pared for me, 6,562 boxes of oranges. 
Out of this number of oranges 18 per 
cent were fancy; 47 per cent >vere F. G. 
brights; 21 per cent golden; 5 per cent 
russetts; 7 per cent plain. We shipped 
27,067 boxes of grapefruit, which repre¬ 
sents the grapefruit from some of the 
best groves along the Indian River and 
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