By Walter V. Woehlke F OR more than half a century New York State has been famous for the apples it produces; the fate of the Delaware peach crop has become a matter of National concern every spring; the reputation of Florida's oranges is older even than that of New York State apples. Along the Atlantic seaboard in the South, in portions of the Middle West, orchards were in blossom and bore fruit before gold was found in California, at a time when Puget Sound was remoter from New York than Cape Town or China. And yet, with the accumulated experience of a hundred years and more at their disposal, the Eastern fruitgrowers are going West to learn their business. Twenty years ago Florida laughed at the puny attempt of the Californians to enter the Eastern markets with their oranges. This spring fifty of Florida's representative orange-growers crossed the continent to study the California methods of growing, packing, and marketing the citrus crop. Fifteen years ago Oregon and Washington imported apples from the East for home consumption. Last year scores of Eastern apple-growers traveled through the gray sage-brush valleys and fir-clad mountains of the Pacific Northwest, inspecting the young orchards growing on the bare hillsides, in an endeavor to discover the cause of the high prices Western apples were bringing in the East. What they saw caused many of them to hurry home, put the ax to their venerable trees, and make a new start along lines developed on the Pacific Coast. The lesson imparted to the Eastern fruitgrowers in the Far West was short and concise. Its main theme, recurring in every phase of the business, from the planting of the tree to the marketing of the crop, was Quality. And to the average unit of a democracy the lesson of Quality is hard to master because the tendency of the mass, as opposed to the class, expresses itself in mediocrity. The service of Quality is hard; it requires sustained effort, thorough training, the continued application of foresight and judgment, as against the nearly automatic performance in the treadmill of mediocrity; but its rewards are proportionately greater. The Californian's average net income of two hundred dollars per acre was the magnet that drew the Florida THE OLIVE PICKER The fruit must be carefully placed in the tin pail, and never dropped in A CROP OF WINESAP APPLES OF THE orange-growers to the Golden State. The Eastern growers of deciduous fruits had heard of car-loads of pears grown in the Rogue River Valley of Oregon that sold for three and four thousand dollars, of pears that brought five, six, and even eight cents apiece, wholesale, in New York City, when their own pears sold for but a small fraction of these prices; they had heard of consignments of apples sent from the Hood River Valley in Oregon, and the Wenatchee Valley in Washington, to London, there to set new price records in competition with the most famous fruits of the Old World. They had heard of apple, pear, and cherry orchards of the Pacific Coast yielding a thousand dollars and more per acre in a year; startling tales of the earnings of Western groves had come to their ears; and their investigations showed that these earnings were the rewards paid by Quality to the faithful toilers in its service. Intrinsically Eastern fruit is in no way inferior to the product of the Pacific Coast. The best grade of apples grown in New York State need fear no comparison with the apple of the West. But only the highest grade can stand the test, for the 125,000 cars of fruit and fruit products that annually roll over the passes of the Rockies, eastward bound, are filled with only the choicest portion of the Western fruit crop. The balance stays at home. This process of WENATCHEE VALLEY, WASHINGTON segregating the best from the inferior is perhaps the chief cause of the Western horticulturist's surprising success. It was not adopted by choice. Circumstances compelled its introduction. When the increasing output of the early groves forced the growers to find a new outlet for the surplus other than the home markets, the populous East and Middle West offered the logical solution of the problem. But between the centers of population and the scattered fringe of young orchards in the half-wilderness lay the width of a continent. On rickety rails in rickety cars the sensitive fruit had to climb to the chilly heights of mountain passes, cross endless shadeless plains shimmering in dry heat waves, and roll across the level stretch of the Mississippi Valley's humid prairies. Obviously only sound fruit could survive such an arduous journey, and then only if carefully packed to withstand the incessant jolting. It became equally obvious that the grower's pocketbook could not endure the cost of the fruit's long trip unless better prices were realized than those paid for Eastern fruit. By sorting his sound fruit into grades and paying freight only on the best, the grower could meet the transportation charges. And when he had clearly seen that only the highest class of fruit was worth shipping, he turned to his orchard in an endeavor to increase the quantity of fruit of shipping grade. Strange, unfamiliar, distorted, the Western orchards appeared to the curious Eastern growers. The Western orchard is no place to linger "in the shade of the old apple tree." The sentiment that attaches itself to the wide-spreading, highcrowned trees of the Eastern groves in their setting of green fields and meadows, of towering maples, sturdy oaks, of soft wooded hills in the hazy distance, of ancient rambling homes peering around the corner of the wood lot across the lazy brook, is absent in the Western fruit regions. The orchard beyond the Rockies is all business, a hard, prosaic fruitproducing factory in which reluctant nature is forced into the harness by the grower. The hills that form the background are naked, treeless. Their harsh contours stand unveiled against the hard sky. No shade trees but ragged rows of eucalyptus break the sweep of the landscape. No green meadows moderate the glare of gray plain and purple hills. Dry, brown dust covers the ground beneath the trees two and three inches deep. Not a vestige of green, not a patch of grass, mitigates the forbidding aspect of the floor out of which the orderly rows of trunks rise. Nothing but a blanket of fine dust, laboriously maintained by the grower to break up capillary attraction, prevents the baking of the surface in the rainless summer and enables the soil to retain its moisture with a minimum of irrigation. The trees are lacking in individuality. They are all of one monotonous size and shape, low, bush-like, the crowns starting but a few feet from the ground that their every portion may be easily and conveniently reached. Harvest time in the Western apple, pear, peach, and cherry orchards is no playtime. There is no shaking of high branches, no screaming of children running to and fro with loads of fruit. When the gangs of pickers go up the stepladders standing alongside of, not leaning against, the trees, the foreman instructs them to take hold of the fruit with the full hand, in order to distribute the pressure evenly over the entire surface, to turn it gently, and, with a rapid lateral twist, detach the stem from the twig, for an apple or a pear without its stem loses caste. In many orchards the fruit is picked into tin buckets in preference to baskets, for tin makes a loud noise if a picker, contrary to instructions, drops the fruit into it instead of laying it down carefully. This slow, painstaking work reduces the daily output of the pickers, but it also reduces the amount of fruit that decays before it arrives in the market. Healthy fruit with an unbroken skin will survive the long journey and remain sound, while the slightest puncture or bruise, even if it be invisible to the eye, offers a foothold to the fungi that cause deterioration. The large storage-bins of the East into which apples and other fruit are dumped as they come from the tree have been discarded in the West. The pickers place their buckets before the sorter, who divides the fruit into three classes, first and second grade and culls. Only perfect fruit above a certain size, of symmetrical shape and good color, goes into the storageboxes containing first grade; fruit having lost the stem, deficient in color, or with a slight blemish on the skin makes up the second grade. All undersized, wormeaten, malformed, diseased, bruised, and overripe specimens travel to the cull pile. The average Eastern apple-grower ships his crop in large barrels containing indiscriminately apples of all sizes and shapes. The cost of buying the barrel and filling it is his only expense. In the West, with its scarcity of labor, the apple must be handled five times before it is ready for shipment, and a special building must be provided and equipped for the operations. operations. After the pickers and graders have finished their work, the applesor pears, peaches, plums, cherries, or apricots are turned over to the sizer, who passes them through a board with circular holes of different diameters, sizing each grade separately. With the heaps of apples of uniform size and grade before them, the wrappers and packers begin their work. Each apple is wrapped in a sheet of tissue paper, the ends are twisted tightly about the stem to keep it from injuring its neighbors, and the wrapped fruit is placed in orderly rows and tiers into a box containing about a bushel, for the smaller the package, the better the fruit will stand shipping. A machine presses the cover down on the |