202 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
for shipment. Where car precooling is 
employed considerable more refrigeration 
is required then in a warehouse room due 
to the leakage of air through the car 
walls. The cooling in a car is also neces¬ 
sarily more or less unequal, the fruits 
near the blast being cooled rather quickly 
while the fruits in the center of the car or 
half way between the doors will cool 
rather slowly. There is also a great dif¬ 
ference, sometimes as mjuch as 30 de¬ 
grees, during cooling between fruits in 
the outside of the package and in the 
center of the same box. 
In a warehouse room the cooling can 
be accomplished with less refrigeration. 
As there need be practically no loss 
of refrigeration through the walls, the 
cooling can be somewhat more even 
or equal as the air can be distributed 
to better advantage. There is an added 
advantage in using a warehouse room for 
precooling in that the fruit can be placed 
in the room and cooled immediately after 
it comes into the warehouse. In the case 
of car precooling the actual cooling can¬ 
not be commenced until the car is fully 
loaded, and in many instances, moved to 
the precooling plant. This oftentimes in¬ 
volves considerable delay which is fully as 
serious in the case of precooling as is the 
slow and delayed cooling under ordinary 
refrigeration. 
In general it may be said that precool¬ 
ing at its best is an expensive proposition. 
It is essentially a business undertaking. 
Anyone contemplating, therefore, the es¬ 
tablishment of precooling plants should 
satisfy himself that it is a paying invest¬ 
ment from the standpoint of delivering 
the produce on the market in sufficiently 
better condition to command a price com¬ 
mensurate with the expense involved in 
precooling. The Department instituted 
these investigations primarily to deter¬ 
mine exactly what there is in precooling 
from a practical standpoint and what the 
effect will be on the various fruits as re¬ 
gards condition in transit and after arri¬ 
val on the market. We have no particular 
system to recommend, in fact no recom¬ 
mendation for precooling itself, until we 
are certain that it is a desirable adjunct to 
the Florida fruit and vegetable shipping 
business. Preliminary results indicate 
that precooling in- this state will have a 
large field of usefulness, but we feel that 
further extensive investigations are neces¬ 
sary before the status of precooling is 
fully established. 
The granting of initial icing privileges 
to Florida shippers makes possible com¬ 
bined precooling and refrigerator at 
less expense than full ordinary refriger- 
tion. During several mlonths of the ship¬ 
ping season precooling with initial icing 
may be entirely practicable.' This is a 
■m 
phase of the precooling and refrigeration 
problem that we want to test out fully 
the coming season. 
The question of whether a mechanical 
ammonia plant or an ice and salt plant is 
best depends upon conditions such as 
number of cars to be precooled, length 
of season, cost of ice, labor, etc. Mechan¬ 
ical ammonia plants require rather heavy 
expensive machinery and expert attention 
during operation. There is, therefore, 
heavy initial expense, as well as a rela¬ 
tively high running charge. The practi¬ 
cability of utilizing such a plant will ob¬ 
viously depend upon the number of cars 
