FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
125 
that we could get them into market, and 
know something of the selling value of 
the two kinds of fruit, sprayed and un¬ 
sprayed, in time to report at this meeting. 
Unfortunately, we were not quite quick 
enough. The fruit was shipped last Sat¬ 
urday. 
The car of unsprayed fruit contained 
300 boxes, graded as follows: Fancy, 
none; bright, ten boxes; russets, 272 
boxes; plain 18 boxes. This car con¬ 
tained 14,740 grapefruit, an average of 
49.1 fruit per box. 
On the same day and in the same train 
and going to the same market, we shipped 
a car picked from the sprayed rows. This 
car contained 143 boxes of fancy; there 
were none in the other car; 119 boxes of 
bright, as against 10 in the other car; 19 
boxes of russets, there were 272 boxes of 
russets in the unsprayed car; and 19 
boxes of plain (greenish) against 18 
plains in the unsprayed car. This sprayed 
car contained 12,842 grapefruit; an aver¬ 
age of 42.8 fruit per box, as against 49.1 
in the unsprayed. It was larger fruit. 
Sixty-seven trees out of the 84 un¬ 
sprayed, picked and packed an average 
of 6.09 boxes per tree. Seventy-seven 
^sprayed trees picked and packed an aver¬ 
age of 6.75 boxes per tree; a difference of 
.66; two-thirds of a box per tree. 
If the average crop nets 60c per box 
on the tree; this increase in the number 
of boxes would be about 400 per tree. The 
cost of spraying was 31.2c per tree, so 
that the spraying not only paid for itself 
but gave a profit of 8.8c per tree, in in¬ 
crease of crop alone. 
When we picked the fruit from these 
four groves of sprayed and unsprayed, 
we picked the entire crop of two adjoin¬ 
ing trees in the same row; one sprayed 
and the other not sprayed. There were 
3 y 2 boxes packed from the unsprayed; 
7lT from the sprayed tree. The number 
of fruits was about the same on each 
tree. These eleven boxes were sent over 
to Mr. Mothers and are on exhibition out 
in the hall. These represented the en¬ 
tire crop from two adjoining trees, one 
sprayed and the other not sprayed. There 
in quite a contrast between the two. As 
to what the difference in value would be, 
we are not prepared to say, because we 
did not get the fruit to market in time. 
We did, however, write to the man who 
sells the fruit, asking his opinion. Hav¬ 
ing sold fruit for over thirty years, we 
felt he was qualified to give an opinion. 
In answer, he writes this letter: 
Hastings, Fla., April 10, 1915. 
Mr. J. A. Stevens, 
DeLand, Fla. 
Dear Sir: 
Referring to your letter of the 8th inst., 
in regard to the relative selling values of 
sprayed and non-sprayed fruit, will say 
that as the writer is now in Florida and 
the time is so short before the meeting 
of which you speak, and I have no means 
of referring to our books in Boston and 
getting absolute figures, that I am afraid 
any information I may give you will be 
simply of a general nature and more in 
the nature of personal ideas. 
Our observations are that the differ¬ 
ence in selling values between sprayed 
and non-sprayed fruit show quite a wide 
range, probably the extremes would be 
from \2]/ 2 z to 75c a box. These ex- 
