70 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
belt. The same process is repeated fifteen 
or twenty feet further, where the “Blue 
Feathers'’ grade are being selected. These 
separate grade belts, as before stated, 
each leads directly to a sizing machine 
handling its particular grade. At the 
head of each of these machines there 
stands another inspector, under whose 
eyes and through whose whitegloved 
hands every piece of fruit leading to that 
sizing machine must pass. It is the duty 
of this foreman of the sizing machine to 
reject any fruit that may come to him 
that is improperly graded, and to also 
look carefully for culls or defective fruit. 
After the fruit passes through this in¬ 
spection it runs through the sizing- 
machine, by which it is delivered to its 
proper bin. From these bins it is packed 
into boxes corresponding with its grade, 
and is then nailed up and loaded into the 
cars, every car being most carefully and 
thoroughly stripped in the California 
fashion. 
It will thus be seen that any cull orange 
that leaves the Winter Park packing 
house, except as such, has fooled a small 
army of people. For instance, it must 
have escaped the picker, who was looking 
for it, the picking inspector, who was 
looking for it, the inspector at the soak¬ 
ing tank, the grader at the main grading 
belt, the sizing foreman, and the packers. 
Seven times each piece of fruit packed 
under the Winter Park brands has been 
carefully scrutinized to find if there was 
anything wrong about it, and in each of 
these seven operations the person examin¬ 
ing it is under positive instructions that 
“Every Doubtful Orange is a Cull.” 
All are interested, of course, in the cost 
of operating in this way. We find that 
it costs us about three cents a box more to 
pick oranges in the way that we pick 
them, and we find that the paper such as 
we wish to use costs about two cents a 
box more than the ordinary, and our 
boxes themselves, which are furnished by 
the Overstreet Crate Company under the 
trade name “Willcardo Type Box,” 
costs us about two cents a box more than 
the ordinary box This box has no sharp 
corners, or rough edges that can mar the 
fruit, even the heads at the top, and the 
middle section at the top are planed off to 
a rounded edge, and the sides of the box 
are all rounded—but we find it pays. 
A packing house can be built and 
equipped as the present Winter Park 
house is for about $20,000, having a ca¬ 
pacity of four cars of fruit a day—this 
includes everything complete. 
As to the cost per box, this depends 
mainly on how much fruit you are pack¬ 
ing, for instance, based for a whole year 
at the Winter Park house, shows that 
aside from the cost of boxes and the 
paper, it costs from the time the oranges 
are driven up in wagons and delivered to 
the hc>use until the loaded car leaves the 
house, 12^2 cents per box, plus $175 a 
week. Now, this would mean with the 
shipment of only 1,000 boxes a week, 
$125, plus $175, or $300, which means 
30 cents a box, exclusive of paper and 
boxes. On the other hand, if we ship 
6,000 a week it only means $750, plus 
$175, or $925, which means 15*^ cents 
per box, plus the cost of boxes and paper 
—so that on a basis of 6,000 boxes a 
week the total cost of receiving, trucking, 
washing, drying, packing, putting insert 
cards in the boxes, nailing up, tallying, 
loading, stripping, foreman, bookkeeping, 
