last four or five years. Above the mass of the growers satisfied with the average returns tower the incomes, often scarcely credible, of the leaders in the industry, of the men who demand that the fruit of their groves be handled from the tree to the car as though it were encased in eggshells. Regularly, year after year, day after day, the fruit packed under the brands of these leaders sells in the New York auction-rooms at prices exceeding those of the general run by half a dollar and more per box. With a minimum yield of 150 boxes of oranges per acrethe groves of the leaders furnish a much larger crop-the premium paid for Quality exceeds $75 per acre. But it requires incessant intelligent effort to earn this premium. No detail is too small to be overlooked by the man anxious for the highest market price. Even the manner of carrying the bag into which the picker places the oranges after cutting them off the trees attracts his attention. In the average orchard the picker simply suspends the bag from the neck by a single band, throwing it over on the left hip every now and then to ease the strain. This shifting of the bag is prohibited in the premium groves. A double band in the form of a yoke fitting across the shoulders holds the bag securely on the picker's chest, making it impossible for him to throw the bag over to the hip and thereby crush and rub the oranges against each other while the stem is still on them without its paper padding. In the best lemon groves the fruit is literally handled with gloves to prevent injuries to the rind through the finger-nails. Canvas instead of wooden bins, hoppers lined with strips of rubber hose, receive the fruit in the packing-houses. The brushes which clean the fruit are adjusted with such nicety that an egg could pass between them unharmed. On their way to the graders, to the weighing-machine, to the sizers, the wrappers and packers, the oranges are no longer rolled down inclined chutes. They travel to their destination in single file over endless belts, and the filled boxes are carried by automatic conveyers, miniature railway lines, to the storage-rooms or the loading platform without the least jar.

It is a long way from the rough barrels,

the crude storage-shelves of the Eastern apple orchards, to the visitors' gallery of the Redlands Orange Producers' Association. Thousands of miles of physical distance lie between them, and on the scale of industrial evolution they are as far apart as the barn in which the country butcher kills a pig and the packing-houses of the Chicago stock-yards. The slaughtering-houses of the Windy City, so far as cleanliness and ingenuity in replacing hand labor by machinery are concerned, would do well to try to reach the standard of the California orange establishment. There is not a dark corner in this bloodless packing-house. A vacuum cleaning system sucks up all dust and dirt, and pleasant rest-rooms have been provided for the employees. Except for the grading and the actual filling of the boxes, all other operations are performed by machines. Without human assistance the brushed, graded, and weighed oranges segregate themselves according to size into different bins. An endless belt carries them in single file under a row of springs arranged in varying heights. The orange with the largest diameter touches the first and highest spring and automatically closes the electric circuit, which operates a kicker that gently shoves the orange off the belt into a padded compart

ment.

The kicker retires before the next orange passes on its way to the spring corresponding to its diameter. Still more ingenious is the wrapping-machine, a steel hand with rubber-lined fingers that pick up the orange from a rubber disk and place it upon a second plate of the same material, across which the tissue paper runs from a roll. Automatically the paper is cut to the proper size, placed around the orange, the four ends are twisted tightly about the stem, and the fruit is ready for the women who place it into the shipping boxes. Before the tissue paper reaches the orange it passes through a miniature printing-press, which stamps the name of the brand upon the sheet. Should a tourist order a special box sent to friends, the form is changed and the sender's name takes the place of the brand.

That Redlands packing-house, with all its intricate machinery, and the box factory operated in conjunction with it, and some fourscore other packing-houses, rep

resenting an investment of over two millions, belong to the citrus-growers, to the men who produce the fruit, and they are operated solely for the producers' benefit. Two hundred miles north of the citrus belt in the San Joaquin Valley lies a compact district which supplies more than half the raisins consumed in the United States. Here, also, large buildings filled with costly machinery are in operation, buildings in which complicated apparatus automatically removes the stems from the dried grapes, takes out the seeds, cleans the raisins, and presses them into packingboxes. But these buildings and their contents do not belong to the growers; they are the property of individuals and corporations, and they are operated solely for the pockets of these individuals and companies, with no regard for the welfare of the producer. The California orangegrowers, owning the appliances for preparing their fruit for the market, are prosperous and smile. The California raisingrowers, paying annual tribute to the firms operating the packing-houses for profit, are unable to make the product of their fertile acres cover expenses. Yet the advantage in age of the industry, in established markets, in lower freight rates, in their ability to hold their product for months and years without deterioration, was all on the side of the raisin-growers. But the orange-producers early learned the value of united action, of welding an unorganized multitude of small, aimless interests into one powerful, homogeneous purpose, and of directing this purpose for the benefit of the entire industry. Cooperation saved the citrus men from the fate of the raisin-growers. The pooling of their pennies made possible the acquisition of the packing-houses and their equipment and placed the man owning five acres on an equal footing with the man having the crop of a hundred and fifty acres to prepare. United action procured for them a reduction in freight rates, and united action helped them to increase the duties on imported citrus fruits. Wherever their example has been followed in the West, the fruit-growers are in comfortable circumstances, their orchards in prime condition, and their settlements thriving, for co-operation presupposes a high degree of intelligence. In

the West co-operation has passed the experimental stage and has become an established fact. From San Diego to Vancouver new organizations of fruitgrowers are being formed constantly, and with the spread of the movement the quality of the product is improving.

Before the young Western fruit industry is on a sound, permanent basis the field of co-operation must be extended. A pool of small growers for the single purpose of packing the fruit at cost is insufficient. A drastic lesson of this insufficiency was taught the cantaloup-growers of the hot Imperial Valley, formerly a portion of the Colorado desert, in the spring of 1908. The cantaloup crop of the district that spring was large. It had the field all to itself. No other melons would appear on the markets for months, and the entire country, tired of canned fruits, was impatiently jingling its spoon for the cantaloups.

But

The first crates brought phenomenal prices; in the scramble for the melons to be eaten while the snow was still on the ground, twenty and thirty cents apiece wholesale was paid by the buyers. The growers were jubilant. For six weeks in March and April forty carloads of cantaloups every day were shipped out of the valley, two thousand car-loads within a month and a half. when the returns came in, the accounts showed that the prices realized for the melons barely covered the transportation and selling expenses. For a whole season's work the growers had practically nothing to show. Of course the producers blamed the railways and the commission houses for their failure. They did not realize that their neglect to consider the effects of supply and demand lay at the bottom of the low prices. With the entire country bare of melons, the growers had consigned nearly all of the two thousand car-loads to but three markets: New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Under this avalanche of melons at a time when only the wealthy consumer considered himself able to buy the fruit, prices broke and dwindled as fast as the melon congestion increased.

The Western horticulturist has learned that the commercial packer works only for his private pocket, and he has almost eliminated private enterprise from this

field.

ness.

He still has to learn that he must take the marketing, the selling end of the business, into his own hands if his success shall be lasting, if chance and speculation shall be removed as factors in the busiThe commission houses to whom the melon shipments of the Imperial Valley were consigned were little concerned in the price slump. Their interest ceased with their commissions. The commission men in the three congested markets could not be expected to be altruistic enough to decline shipments on account of low prices, to send them to competitors in other cities that the grower might obtain a reasonable return for his work.

Thanks to the extension of co-operation to the selling part of the business, no other Western fruit is marketed with fewer price fluctuations or with greater regularity than the California orange crop. Thirty thousand car-loads of citrus fruit are disposed of annually in Eastern markets without congestion, without oversupply at one point and scarcity at another. This result is achieved because four thousand of the six thousand growers act as a unit in the marketing process. Through a central organization, the California Fruit-Growers' Exchange, these growers distribute their crop evenly throughout the country. The central body acts as an orange clearinghouse. It receives the fruit from the individual members, apportions it among the markets, sells it, and transmits the returns to the growers. It does not work for profit. All services are performed at actual cost raised by a small uniform levy upon each box of fruit sold. The Exchange does not, like a number of farmers' unions organized of late, attempt to fix prices, to manipulate the market by creating artificial scarcity. It simply attempts to systematize the distribution of the crop, to prevent congestion, and to stimulate the demand. Neither does it curtail individual enterprise. The better the fruit of the individual grower, the higher will be the price it brings and the larger the returns transmitted to him through the Exchange. If a grower's fruit be of inferior quality or poorly packed, that grower must content himself with the price his fruit realizes through the Exchange; but whether his fruit be low grade or high, the Exchange enables

him to dispose of it at prevailing prices for the grade without paying tribute to speculators or commission houses, for the Exchange maintains a thoroughly organized sales force of its own in every market of the country. Through this organization the growers are able to ship two hundred car-loads of oranges a day for months without causing the price to slump below the limit of profit, to preserve system and order where chaos reigned before. Sixteen years ago the unorganized growers slept restlessly under the nightmare of overproduction, because a crop of four thousand car-loads sold for less than the cost of transportation and selling. To-day, with an output seven times larger, overproduction has ceased to be a menace.

Co-operation in the packing and marketing processes leaves the grower free to devote all his attention to his trees. They need it. Left to their own devices, fruit trees in most portions of the Western fruit districts will either die immediately or the long, rainless summer, the parched, baked ground, will stunt them. Orchards in the East will produce a fair-sized crop without a particle of care, but in the West the grower must work for every apple, pear, peach, cherry, or orange his trees develop and mature. This unceasing effort needed in the production of crops circumscribes, both through the amount of money and labor involved, the size of individual holdings. Nature forces the Western grower to confine himself to a small plot of ground, rewarding him in proportion to the amount of care he bestows upon his few acres. Prodigious crop figures, miraculous yields, have been reported from these small farms of the West, without, however, a statement of the effort, experience, and cash the grower put into the ground before it yielded the harvest. At one of the recent FruitGrowers' Conventions of California C. C. Teague, a grower who had become wealthy from a forty-acre lemon grove, presented an itemized statement showing that each one of his forty acres required an annual expenditure of $233 before a box of lemons was shipped. With the freight charges included, this grower had to make each acre produce $600 worth of lemons before a cent of profit accrued to himself. Yet he succeeded when a

neighboring grove slipped out of its owner's hands through neglect.

There are no periods of rest for the Western fruit-grower. From January to December he must fight for his crop. He must irrigate; he must cultivate the soil continuously; he must sow and plow under cover crops to maintain the humus supply; he must spread tons of fertilizer; he must prune and trim his rank-growing trees; he must defend them against insect, fungous, and bacterial enemies; and he must even fight the prodigality of appeased nature that his fruit may be of the desired quality. For if he is loyal to his orchard, the trees in the mild climate will proceed to cover themselves with such an enormous load of fruit that many of the branches would break and the vitality of the tree become exhausted. In the East nature takes care that the tree's load shall not be excessive. Wind, torrential rains, frost, hail they all take their share of the blossoms and immature fruit, often until nothing is left to ripen in the fall. In the West the grower must assist nature and lighten the load his trees are bearing. It is a cruel, tedious task, this thinning out of the growing crop. It hurts the grower's heart to see bushels upon bushels of small apples, peaches, or pears stripped off the branches and thrown on the ground, but the progressive grower will not let his greed overcome his reason. He knows that the balance left on the trees will more than recompense him for the loss. By a systematic thinning of the immature fruit the grower can determine with almost mathematical accuracy what

size the remainder shall attain. The more fruit he removes, the larger the spaces between the specimens left on the branches, the larger the diameter of the fruit will be when it ripens. By decreasing the space, he can raise a larger quantity of smallersized fruit. The thinning process intelligently performed gives the grower a chance to remove all malformed, injured, worm-eaten, or diseased fruit, enabling the tree to devote all its energies to the production of a sound, healthy crop of uniform size.

Though the fruits, fresh, dried, canned, and preserved, of the Pacific Coast are marketed in almost every country of the world, the industry is as yet in its swaddling-clothes. Within five years the States of the Pacific Northwest will have increased their fruit production fivefold, and California will not lag behind. Already the cry of overproduction is heard again, faintly. The Pacific Coast need fear no increase in production, if modern marketing methods are adopted. The danger lies rather in a falling off of the product's quality. Attracted by the glittering profits per acre earned by men who gave years of study and toil not only to their orchards but to each individual tree, newcomers are rushing in and setting out numberless trees after cursory investigations, in the hope of becoming rich without effort. Even the long-distance method of fruit-raising is finding favor with men having land to sell to non-residents. The business of growing Quality fruit requires wide and varied experience, the knowledge of an expert.