Tropical Fruits 
H. C. Henricksen 
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 
I regret that I cannot be with you at 
your annual meeting for I am sure that 
I could be of help to those of you who 
are really interested in tropical fruit 
growing. I know from experience that 
a good practical discussion is worth more 
than yards of prepared speech but as you 
have accorded me the honor of appoint¬ 
ing me on one of your standing commit¬ 
tees I feel that the least I can do is to 
send you a few notes. 
The subject is so large and it is possi¬ 
ble to treat it in so many ways that it is 
a question what one ought to mention and 
what should be excluded. It seems to me 
that what you ought to be interested in is 
the development of the fruit industry in 
the American Tropics and I will treat 
the subject from that standpoint. In 
comparing Florida with Islands in the 
West Indies and countries in South 
America where the climate is strictly 
tropical I wish you to 1 remember that I 
lived in Florida for a number of years and 
I wish to say that there has been no time 
in my life that I look back upon with 
greater pleasure than some of the years 
I spent in your beautiful state. I have 
since that lived in various places in the 
tropics proper and while my experience 
as a whole has been very pleasant I can¬ 
not say that I long to go back to any 
place but just Florida. I made very little 
money in Florida which was probably 
more my fault than the fault of the coun¬ 
try, but Florida was home to me. I made 
a great deal more money in other places, 
but somehow I never felt at home. From 
this you will see that I have two stand¬ 
ards of comparison, the sentimental and 
the business; and from what I have ob¬ 
served in Florida, and elsewhere, most 
fruit growers have these two 1 standards, 
whether they are conscious of it or not 
The difficulty in using them is that they 
cannot be reduced to the same value. One 
of the standards cannot be measured in 
money and we have no right to judge 
the man or woman on a five acre orange 
grove or vegetable patch who may seem 
to work hard and make but little money. 
They may be happier than others who 
pile up millions. 
With that thought in view we will be 
better able to do justice to the subject of 
tropical fruit growing. A casual investi¬ 
gator, looking at it from a business stand¬ 
point would undoubtedly conclude that it 
would not be good policy for him to> grow 
tropical fruits in Florida. Ffe would 
say: The soil is poor, the climate is un¬ 
certain, labor is expensive and possibly 
several other things. He might be right, 
but just because it would not look promis¬ 
ing for him to plant a hundred acres, en¬ 
gage a good manager and hire labor, that 
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