FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
85 
their money. Now, the man with whom 
we deal is the jobber. You cannot sell 
in the interior towns in carloads, and 
nobody but a jobber can buy a carload. 
He has to have time to distribute it to 
the retailer. It was a common saying 
that Florida oranges would not keep. 
My friends, the Florida Citrus Ex¬ 
change has demonstrated within two 
years that the Florida orange will keep 
even better than the Californias. There 
is an Association packing house at 
Florence Villa that will have put out 
close to 100,000 boxes, and I do not 
believe their decay will amount to one- 
tenth of one per cent. It is no more 
trouble to sell a car of Florence Villa 
fruit today, than the best fruit out of 
California. We have been selling Val¬ 
encias, in Texas, at $3.00 delivered, 
and the dealer and consumer were sat¬ 
isfied, and wanted more. It is all folly 
to talk about the Florida oranges not 
keeping. 
I had occasion to make a talk to the 
growers at Winter Haven. They have 
had some dissatisfaction in their As¬ 
sociation. Just a mile and a half from 
there is Florence Villa, and I do not 
think you will find a man in Florence 
Villa who is dissatisfied with the Ex¬ 
change. Will you, Mr. Thompson? 
Mr. Thompson: No, sir; not one. 
The Association at Florence Villa is 
a success, because they went at the 
proposition in a business way; put in¬ 
telligent men in charge. Their machin¬ 
ery is of the finest type, and they grow 
their fruit after the best methods. They 
do not hesitate to pay the top price for 
the best goods, and they know when 
they are getting what they pay for. 
The other packing house—a mile and 
a half from there—is being run on an 
economical basis. They are not quite 
willing to make such a large outlay all 
at one time. As a consequence, while 
the Florence Villa fruit is going into 
market perfectly sound, the other 
packing house fruit is going in 20 to 30 
per cent, decayed. There is the con¬ 
trast—fruit grown side by side under 
the same conditions. 
I asked Mr. Ramsey to investigate 
the cause of their decay. He came back 
and said: “There is trouble enough. 
In the first place, they disregard every 
rule for the handling of fruit. Their 
washing machine has no dryer. The 
fruit is run through that machine and 
dropped in a box. That box is set in 
a corner and another box is filled and 
set beside it, and so on. It sits there 
three or four days to dry.” Any man 
of ordinary information ought to know 
that it has been demonstrated by the 
Department from Washington that 
that is an ideal condition to pro¬ 
duce blue mold. With moisture an ' 
heat, blue mold spores will be pro- 
' duced by the million. Besides this un¬ 
forgivable sin of stacking their wet 
fruit away in corners for several days, 
Mr. Ramsey reported clipper cuts, long 
stems and other mechanical injuries. 
Then, they had the nerve to complain 
because the returns were not what they 
thought they should be, and they 
blamed the Exchange. You can’t 
blame them for being disappointed 
