American Agriculturist, August 9, 1924 
^11 ■ a ^ 9 - -- au s u » l y , 
The Port Authority and Farm Markets 
An A. A. Wednesday Evening Radio Talk Broadcast From WEAF 
M 
'ANY of the audience listening to these 
remarks are farmefs, producers of the 
milk and eggs, the potatoes and 
cabbage which feed the millions of 
people in the Port of New York area. Many, 
many more are the consumers of these products. 
In the New York Port District alone there live 
about 8,000,000 people who must be fed. The 
greatest single interest of both producers and 
consumers alike is to keep down the costs of 
distribution. It is a known fact that the city 
distribution system takes a large part of the 
money paid by the consumer for perishable foods. 
Careful studies of the spread between wholesale 
and retail prices of 14 fruits and vegetables show 
that out of every dollar spent by the consumer 
48 cents is absorbed in distribution after sale at 
the terminals. These studies, 
carried on jointly by the 
Port Authority and the Fed¬ 
eral Department of Agricul¬ 
ture for more than a year- 
under the direction of Mr. 
W. P. Hedden and the Staff 
of the Port Authority, in¬ 
volving collection of upwards 
of 10,000 quotations, are 
authoritative. Forty-eight 
cents out of every dollar for 
city distribution! 
IIow can this spread be 
reduced and in what way can 
the farmers help? Only a 
* few brief suggestions can be 
made here. 
Improved Grading and 
Packing of Perishables 
If ever the terminal costs 
are to be cut, some of the 
handling and rehandling of 
the bulk of the produce in 
and out of congested centers 
must be eliminated. On that 
part of the stuff which is so 
carefully graded and packed 
that trading can be done by* 
merely inspecting samples 
instead of the whole carlot, a 
real saving is possible in trucking and handling. 
Such stuff could be unloaded at a joint receiving 
terminal on cheap land, there broken up in accord 
with the result of sales from samples at central 
auction rooms, and finally gathered together for 
direct movement to outlying markets. The 
present practice of floating or trucking entire 
carloads into one congested district could be 
done away with to the extent that careful grading 
and packing insures a sample to be truly repre-. 
sentative of the entire carlot. 
Organize for Marketing 
Too much of the marketing of the past has been 
haphazard. This is especially true in the case of 
extreme perishables, such as lettuce, strawberries, 
watermelons and the like. Shippers have followed 
a strictly individual policy which has resulted in a 
widely variable supply and violent changes in 
price from day to day. For example, the whole¬ 
sale price of lettuce at New York on April 16 of 
this year was $7.00 per basket, an exceptionally 
high price due to a temporary shortage of receipts. 
Four weeks later it had dropped to 75 cents a 
basket down below the freight rate from shipping 
point, just because the shippers in their scramble 
to take advantage of the previous high price put 
91 cars on track in a single day. The same thing 
has been true of watermelons this year. During 
the period from June 20 to June 25 the average 
price per car of 25 lb. melons was $500, but 
suddenly over 1700 cars were shipped from 
Georgia alone in two days; 334 in all appeared on 
track at New York on July 14, and the price 
sagged to $160 a car or about 14 cents per melon, 
a price below the freight rate. Such experiences 
are ruinous to everybody handling perishables. 
By DeWITT VAN BUSKIRK 
Chairman, the Port of New York Authority 
Growers, dealers, even the railroads, lose and the 
benefit to consumers is very slight because none 
but a few hucksters are willing to risk paying 
handling and trucking charges in such a glutted 
market. A good organization to direct the distri¬ 
bution to many markets, diverting from one to the 
other as the need arises, preventing both scarcity 
and glut, is a real necessity. 
Study the Needs of the Consumer 
Having an effective organization it is to the 
farmers’advantage to employable experts to study 
the needs of the consumers in each market. It is 
truly surprising how the demand for certain foods 
This gives an idea of the congestion in front of the piers along West Street, New York City. One of our 
problems is to avoid this, which is an enormous expense to producer and consumer. 
% 
may change from day to day, depending on the 
season, the day of the week, and the weather. 
To know how many families will cancel the daily 
quart of milk because of a Labor Day holiday 
It is, of course, obvious that the more units there 
are over which to distribute fixed costs of retailing 
the less will be the cost per unit. The more you 
can sell the less will be not only your own costs 
per unit, but the fraction of the consumer’s dollar 
taken up on the city margin. 
I have mentioned briefly four methods by which 
the farmer may improve his market for perishable 
foods. How will these changes affect the con- 
sumer? They will all tend to cut down that large 
spread between farm price and store price, by 
reducing physical handling costs, by eliminating 
as far as possible, extreme price fluctuations and 
physical waste of glutted markets, by bringing the 
right grade, size and variety in the right container 
to the right market at the. time when it is most 
needed, and by increasing volume of sales and 
decreasing unit costs. A1 
should benefit consumer 
well as producer. 
Although many improve¬ 
ments in terminal marketing 
can be brought about by 
concerted action of farmers 
themselves, as our investiga¬ 
tions have shown, there stilj 
remain some badly needed 
changes which can be put 
into effect only by coopera¬ 
tive effort on the part of 
shippers, carriers, receivers 
and public administrativ 
agencies. The establishment 
of adequate terminal facili¬ 
ties and the reorganization 
of handling methods is a case 
in point. There is no ques^ 
tion that new market ter¬ 
minals will be constructed at 
various points in the New 
York Port area. The only 
question is whether those 
terminals when they are 
built will be properly de¬ 
signed and located so that 
real savings in handling costs 
will result. Just erecting 
piers and buildings will not 
solve the problem. 
They must have inlets and outlets to freight 
carriers. They must be linked up with the trunk 
line railroads which haul produce to the city 
and with belt lines and motor highways which 
outing, or how many more half-pints of whipping furnish the internal distributing system. More- 
cream will be needed on Thanksgiving Day, or how over, they must be designed in accordance 
the consumption of lettuce will fall off as the with sound commercial and engineering prin- 
temperature goes down 10 degrees, will be a real ciples so that the breaking up of carlots of cab- 
step in the direction of orderly marketing. Not bages and beans and the gathering together of 
only the quantity but the quality, the unit size, the fragments, 20 crates of cabbage, 10 hampers 
and the kind of container demanded by the con- of beans, 25 bags of potatoes and the rest of the 
sumer should be known. When the hotel day’s supplies of carrots, grapes, oranges and 
stewards buy oranges they want only the large and what-not which go out to the suburban centers, 
above-medium sizes, while the push-cart men are can be accomplished with speed and saving, 
quite sure of being able to dispose of the smaller Because of its general supervisory authority 
sizes. The hotels want their baking potatoes over port development and its intensive study of 
specially sized, guaranteed and packed in boxes, this problem, the Port Authority is well able to 
1 he push-cart vendors want their apples in boxes advise and participate in plans for market ter- 
so that they may be up-ended on the cart for minals. The intensive studies previously men- 
display. An efficient selling agency must take tioned have yielded much valuable information on 
these and many other facts into consideration the whole marketing situation in the Port District, 
when distributing to terminal markets. much more than can be mentioned here. Some of 
Reduce Sp, ead by Heavy Turnover this has made available in public 
reports and more will be m the future. Persons 
Stimulate sales by moderate prices, publicity, interested in learning more of this subject may 
attention to consumer’s preferences and every write directly to the office of the PortAuthority, 11 
other legitimate method. Our studies have 
shown that the volume of business or the turnover 
has a very great influence upon the spread between 
wholesale and retail prices. A staple commodity, 
such as potatoes, is distributed by city dealers 
with a margin of 40 cents for every dollar of sales 
Broadway, New York City, and may be sure that 
all available information will be gladly furnished. 
* * * 
American Agricuturlst, through the cooper¬ 
ation of WEAF, the New York Telephone and 
Telegraph Company, puts on a short program 
Western lettuce, a perishable semi-luxury, takes every Wednesday evening at 6:50 P.M. Standard 
56 cents for every dollar of sales. The volume of Time, for the special benefit of farmers. If you 
sale of the first is six times that of the latter, like these talks write us—if you want more or any 
Hence, a pretty sure method of reducing the special subject, let us know also. It is our pur- 
spread on any commodity is to increase the sales, pose to give our readers what they want. 
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