The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-07-03
CANNED FRUIT.
Season Four Months Long and Product
 Enormous.

s+ g9 et 5E < % Season Four Months Long and Product Enormous.
 The canned fruit industry on the wholesale scale has assumed tremend- l ous proportions in California. Last year the great fruit belt around San Francisco shipped away more than 113,- | 900, ,0o0 pounds of canned fruit. Yet the demand for this product has steadily increased despite the fact that the
 canned fruit output for this season wili come to more than 150,OO 900 pounds.
 Canned fruits are perhaps more of manufactures than agricultural pro- ducts. They are obviously much more valuable than a smaller bulk in canned vegetables, although vegetables have been long preserved on mammoth scale, while fruit canning on giant basis Is practically a new industry. Yet California exports of. preserved fruits | last year amounted to more than $S.0o0- 900, second only to the exports of fresh fruits. of which 7,500 carloads were shipped, having value of s15, ,000,00.
 Altogether about 150.0o0 persons are em- ployed in the different branches of the fruit canning industry.
 There are thousands of small pro- ducers having fruit farms of five to forty acres who raise and harvest their crops which are immediately turned over to the great canneries. The cam neries in California have been a vast benefit to the small producer He al- ways find a market for his produts and there is never any risk of his crop becoming decayed while en route to the N great cities of the East. There is an increasing demand for his entire out put and the apricots which have been harvested by his children are delicacies to the soldier in the Philippines, the scout in South Africa, or the lonely granger upon the barren flats of Australia, as we'll as to the entire people lof the United States. In fact, the worlds appetite for canned fruit is
 shown the fact that they are now ex- ported to almost every known quarter
 of the civilized globe with the exceptions of the colder regions of the North. American canned fruits are beating out the products of Fance, Italy and Spain on their own ground. 4s: It takes sixty canneries to care for the great output of the fruit belt, and although these big factories have every l facility for manufacturing canned fruits with the utmost rapidly, yet fre- quently they are obliged to run night and day to keep pace between Sacra- mento and San Francisco; there are fif- teen of these big eanneries, some of 1 them employing as many as 800 hands in the height of the season. In the great Stockton fruit district there are twenty carnaries, and eight large factories are found in the Santa. Clara, while at Fresno in the fruit drying region, there are some half dozen big canning factor- l ies in full blast. These factories care for almost nine-tenths of the California fruit crop; very little fruit is canned in | Southern California. The canning season commences about l the first of September, and lasts well along until Christmas. The apricot, peach, pear, and prime are the first crops treated. It is the custom for every large cannery to have several ex- perienced buyers who go through the country and purchase the harvest just as 1t stands upon the trees. The usual price for an apricot crop as it stands on the trees is from s250 to $450 an acre. | Often peaches and pears bring from $500 l to $600 an acre. The larger canning factories will trea. 1000 tons of fruit
 during the season, 40000 cans of fruit
 being considered a large days work.
 \ { In addition to the great force em- | ployed in a large cannery, the vast
 orchards, sometimes 1000 or more acres in extent, call upon a great number of pickers to attend the immense crop. Il
 usually requires two experienced hands
 to the acre during picking day. The
 army of pickers descend upon an orch- | ard like an immense swarm of bees, and the trees when they have been so load | ed with fruit that their laden boughs have been strongly propped, soon pres- ent barren appearance. The fruit bell circles about San Francisco for radius of 150 miles, and on this account the pickers never have far to travel from l one days work to the next. <. After the apricot, the peach, the prune and the pear. crops have: been disposed of in order. the factories turn