16 
EIGHTY YEARS OF GROWING 
gravity chute to waiting trucks. More than one million packets and cartons are picked out daily 
during the packing season. 
But the old rules are still as rigidly enforced as in the early days of the business. The seeds 
put into packets and cartons meet the high standards set; the filling and packing operations 
are checked with the greatest care; packets are not sent out for sale a second season. So it is 
that specially built machines are at work day after day during each fall and winter, tearing up 
every unsold packet and carton returned by dealers. The seeds are carefully segregated and 
tested. If they meet the high standards imposed by the company, they are used again; if not, 
they are burned, used for feed or fertilizer, 
sold to pharmaceutical concerns. That per¬ 
ennial question/'What do you do with the 
old seeds?” is answered thousands of times 
each year by Ferry-Morse salesmen. 
The founders of the business believed 
that in the last analysis the home gardener 
would have to depend largely for his pro¬ 
tection upon the reputation of the firm 
whose name was on the packet of seeds he 
purchased. Two hundred thousand Ferry- 
Morse displays in stores in the United 
States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Mexico attest 
the degree to which the Ferry-Morse Seed 
Co. has furnished that protection. 
In the early days of the commission packet business. A Ferry 
representative, David Copeland, in 1879, just after trading his 
saddle for a sleigh 
BRUSH t MONROE 
1880-1935 
w 1 ■ ^ 
Eaul# • ■ 
COMPARING THE OLD AND THE NEW 
H illiam T. Radcliffe, who entered the employ of D. M. Ferry & Co. in 1871, displaying his equipment of sixty years ago 
