FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
71 
only 0.4 per cent, rot on arrival at mar¬ 
ket for carefully handled sound fruit. 
The work has now been carried far 
enough so that it seems safe to say that 
the Florida orange inherently is a good 
keeper. We can go even farther than 
this and say that it has been possible to 
pick, pack and ship the fruit in a way 
that has practically insured its safe ar¬ 
rival on the market. Judging from the 
past season’s shipping experiments, it 
seems safe to say that any large percent¬ 
age of decay in transit is not necessary. 
The question then does not seem to be, 
“Is it possible for the Florida Orange to 
carry to market?” but rather “Is it prac¬ 
ticable to handle the crop in such a way 
that the carrying quality has not been in¬ 
jured?” The first question seems to be 
well solved in our investigations and we 
have now turned our attention to the 
practicability of careful handling. 
THE HANDLING IN THE ORCHARD. 
Before there can be good carrying 
quality, there must be careful work in 
harvesting the fruit. Under the present 
conditions, a premium is placed on the 
amount of work done, rather than on the 
quality. In handling a tender perishable 
product, it is false economy to reduce the 
cost of an operation at the expense of the 
keeping quality. A laborer picking 75 
boxes of oranges per day at five cents a 
box and injuring a quarter or more of it, 
and dropping the oranges several feet 
into his picking bag or box, is far more 
expensive than the one who 1 picks 30 
boxes for $3.00 a day, but who does his 
work carefully. 
There are three points that need care¬ 
ful attention by the picker. (1) the 
oranges should not be cut or punctured 
by the clippers, (2) the stems should be 
cut short, (3) the fruit should be put in 
its place by hand and not thrown or 
dropped. 
CLIPPER CUTTING. 
The smooth round Florida orange can 
be cut from the tree with a short stem 
without injuring the fruit with the clip¬ 
pers more easily than can the California 
navel, which has a depression around the 
stem. Notwithstanding this, considerable 
damage is being done by clipper cutting. 
The amount of injury varies widely in 
different picking gangs. 
CHART I. 
Percentage of Clipper Cutting by Individual 
Pickers in One Gang. 
0.0 
8.0 
12.8 
2.6 
10.0 
26.0 
3.4 
11.0 
36.7 
Chart I shows the work of the in¬ 
dividual pickers in one gang in Florida. 
Of the nine pickers, not more than one 
or two were doing satisfactory work. 
The average for the nine was over 12 per 
cent, cut fruit. Not all of these injured 
oranges would decay under ordinary 
shipping conditions. With conditions fa¬ 
vorable for rot, however, a large percent- 
age would go down. As a matter of 
fact, several boxes of the fruit picked by 
the two men showing the high percent¬ 
ages of clipper cuts, after being packed 
fourteen days, contained 21 per cent, 
waste, and the beginning of the decay 
could almost invariably be traced to the 
injury made by the clippers. Another 
lot of fruit selected from the more care¬ 
ful pickers and packed and held the same 
length of time and under the same con¬ 
ditions had 3 per cent, decay. 
The clipper cutting indicated in Chart 
l iS above the average for Florida. In 
