34 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
ments arrived on the market with abso¬ 
lutely no decay at a time when, in ship¬ 
ments from other houses, 20 per cent, 
was the rule rather than the exception. 
The second house has not been one 
of the leaders until this year. Its record 
at the beginning of the present season 
was not the best. This apparently put 
the management on its mettle, and a con¬ 
sistent and successful attempt was made 
to improve conditions. During the pe¬ 
riod of heaviest decay this house shipped 
car after car of fruit under ventilation 
and had it arrive on the market in sound 
condition. At the same time, other pack¬ 
ing houses having equally good equipment 
and handling equally good fruit, were 
getting returns showing from 10 to 30 
per cent, decay. When -I visited this house 
the first of March, I found one of the 
best organized and managed picking- 
crews in the State. There is no doubt 
that the secret of their success lay right 
there. This, of course, does not discount 
the value of careful and efficient manage¬ 
ment in the packing house.- 
In 1911 the Bureau of Plant Industry 
was called upon to investigate heavy de¬ 
cay in California oranges arising under 
conditions similar to what have been ex¬ 
perienced in Florida this season. That 
is, there was 'an unusually large crop 
of fruit, resulting in over-crowding the 
picking crews and packing houses; and 
warm, rainy weather prevailed during 
the shipping season. Work on orange 
handling had been carried on in Califor¬ 
nia previous to this, having been con¬ 
cluded in 1908. A large number of sup¬ 
plementary experiments were made in 
1911, and it was found, as has been 
demonstrated in the Florida work, that 
carefully handled , uninjured fruit kept 
in sound condition under the most ad¬ 
verse weather conditions. It was also 
found that in the rush to get the fruit on 
the market there had been a serious let¬ 
down in care in handling. The conditions 
in Florida this season seem to me almost 
an exact duplicate of those in California 
in 1911. 
In summing up the results of this Cal¬ 
ifornia work in a circular of the Bureau 
of Plant Industry, Mr. Stubenrauch said: 
“The industry must always be prepared 
to meet the exceptional and the unusual.” 
The Florida citrus industry this season 
has had to contend with exceptional and 
unusual conditions, and in most cases 
has tried to meet them with the usual, 
or a little poorer than the usual, methods. 
We cannot tell when such conditions will 
arise again, but they will arise sooner or 
later. I believe the remedy lies in recog¬ 
nizing what these conditions mean, and 
in exercising exceptional care in all hand¬ 
ling operations. If necessary, cut down 
the output of your packing house one- 
half during a period of high decay, but 
see that every orange you ship is hand¬ 
led carefully all the way from the tree to 
the car. Unless absolutely necessary, and 
unless thorough drying can be obtained, 
it is advisable not to wash fruit during 
warm, humid weather. 
There is abundant evidence in support 
of the statement that carefully handled 
uninjured fruit will keep under the most 
unfavorable conditions. It has been dem¬ 
onstrated by repeated experiments in both 
Florida and California, on thousands of 
boxes of fruit from all the orange grow- 
