74 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
fruit, is one of the greatest problems we 
have to deal with. Most of us have to 
hire a good deal of help every year, and 
they have to be taught to grade; that is 
another reason why you cannot grade 
closer than what I have advocated; to do 
it you would have to have your men with 
you year after year. You would have to 
give them training more than one season. 
Different pickings may vary a good 
deal, even in the same grove. If the fruit 
is running generally rough your men will 
make a pretty rough fancy grade, while if 
you have beautiful, smooth pineapple or¬ 
anges, the tendency is to make your sec¬ 
ond grade a little too low. It is exceed¬ 
ingly hard to train men to take any class 
of fruit and grade it exactly and not 
make your fancies too rough and your 
second grade too low. 
Mr. Thompson: I have here some 
fruit that is packed and graded as we 
handle it at Florence Villa. I want to 
apologize for the looks of the fruit. I had 
it shipped to myself and wrote a letter 
asking the Express Company to hold it 
for me. I had to go out this afternoon 
and hunt it up. It had been delivered to 
a family in the city and they had partially 
used it. It made me late at the meeting, 
as I did not have the fruit here as I ex¬ 
pected. 
Last year, I was, fortunately or un¬ 
fortunately, manager of the Florence 
Villa Citrus Association. It was a hard 
proposition, and a difficult problem, but 
I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are 
many pleasant things about it. This 
problem of grading is something that I 
hardly know how to take hold of. We 
had many meetings of our directors and 
several changes were made before we set¬ 
tled on our present grade. 
We divide the fruit into three grades. 
Our Florence grade is the best grade we 
put out. We do not call it fancy, we call 
it bright. All oranges coming up to these 
requirements: “All smooth, heavy, good¬ 
shaped fruit, discoloration allowed not 
larger than a quarter of a dollar.” 
Our last grade, or third grade, is the 
Cat brand. This is the fruit “not more 
than three-fourths russet fruit, and all 
merchantable fruit, including odd shapes, 
small defects, etc.” 
The Gondola, or the middle grade, is 
all fruit between the Florence and the 
Cat, so there you have the description of 
the three grades we carry. 
I think that, as a rule, our fruit has 
brought as good prices in the market as 
any fruit sold by the Exchange. At the 
close of this season, we had shipped over 
90,000 boxes, and we have divided it all 
into three grades. 
It is exceedingly difficult, as has been 
said by Mr. Hart and by others, to get the 
help trained to grade the fruit. Very 
frequently, right in the middle of the sea¬ 
son when we were shipping heavily and 
rushed to our greatest capacity, some of 
the best graders would leave, or be taken 
sick, and new help would have to come in. 
It has not been possible to get graders 
trained to do this work as we want it, so 
of course there are more or less defects 
in the grading, but in a very short time 
we will have a number of graders who 
will know what we want and they will be 
prepared to do it. 
This last year, not knowing the amount 
of fruit we had, we ran short and wanted 
to get rid of some old wraps we had, so 
we disregarded the question of wraps, but 
another year we are going to use the same 
wraps on all our grades. We will desig- 
