The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1908-06-17
THE ORANGE IN
It's HABITAT
Southern California and Its
Washington Navel
Fruit.
advertiser Correspondence, Copyright
by Frederic j. Haskin.)

your orange at DredRIdSC toHloIIoW .yo'
may look upon it as symbol of th'
high-water mark of progress in thu
application of cultural and economic
science to the world-old business OF
producing food and wealth from the
soil. The California Washington nave
orange is grown according to scien
tlfc method, and it is marketed by
scientific method. It's history from
the beginning is a romance. Oranges
and lemons have been grown in Cali
fornia for more than a century, but II
was not until the introduction of the
navel orange in 1874 that the present
era of progress began. The seedless
navel orange is in itself a triumph OF
a scientific man, who desired to get rid
of the seeds which made the orange SO
hard to eat.
The orange you will eat tomorrow
was grown in Southern California upon
land which would grow nothing in its
natural state. Water had to be brought
from a great distance and applied to
the land to give it life. If you were
to become so interested in oranges as
to be impelled to go to California and
buy citrus ranch, you would find sci
ence guiding your every step. The
land might cost you thousand dollars
an acre. Science and irrigation made
all that value. Five or ten acres would
be the size of it, and the chances are
that you would know as much about
growing oranges or lemons as you do
about running canal boats on Mars.
But the local citrus union would look
after you. One day you would find a
man under one of your trees with a
blanket spread out on the ground. He
is armed with a microscope and he
knows all about bugs. If your trees
need it, he will tell you when to fumi-
gate. If you neglect to do so, the
chances are that you will wake up some
fine morning to find the fumigators at
work in your orchard. So when it is
time to prune, or time to irrigate, or
time to do any one of the thousand and
one things that must be done to grow
citrus fruit, the experienced practical
scientists of the community will see to
it that you do not lack for advice. If
you find a strange bug on leaf, you
take it to one of the government sci
entists always within reach. He gen.
orally knows what it is, whether it is
harmful, and if so, how to fight it. But
if it is new bug, then the department
of agriculture begins right there to find
out all about it, and will spend thou
sands of dollars, if necessary, to that
end So far does science go in grow
ing oranges.
But an orange grown is of very little
account unless it can be sold at a
profit When Southern California first
began to produce citrus fruit in con-
siderable quantity, it found that il
was so far away from the populous
centers of the East, where it must
find consumers, that the profits were
often wiped out by freights and COM
missions Men worked long years and
planned skilfully only to have the re-
turns from their fist shipments come
back in red"-the fatal red ink of the
wrong side of the account ledger.
So it came about that economic sci
ence was applied to the packing, ship
ping and marketing of the fruit-com-
pleting the circle of scientific progress
which wraps the orange from the bios
som to the breakfast table. The grow
ers in each community formed local
! acking organizations. they in turn
fern ed district organizations, and the
district bodies formed a central con-
Germ which is now known as the Cali
fornia Fruit Growers Exchange. This
scheme of organization was worked out
slowly and gradually, step at a time.
The first movement toward intelli-
gent cooperation was the result of the
disastrous year of 1923. That year
many growers not only had to furnish
their entire crop for nothing, but to
pay the packing and freight charges
besides, as the gross sales of the fruit
in the East would not cover the ex-
penses. Then a convention met, it's
declared purpose being to Provide for
the marketing of all the citrus fruit
at the lowest possible cost under uni
form methods, and in a manner to
secure to each grower a certain mar
keting of his fruit, and the full aver
age price to be obtained in the market
for the entire season." This purpose
has been accomplished. The detail of
the growth of the present organization
from that convention is interesting
but it is unnecessary to set it out here
Let it suffice to look at the condi-
lions which did prevail under the old
fashioned methods and the conditions
of the present.
In the old days the growers were
all in cut-throat competition with each
other. There was no such thing as
uniform grading and packing. The
packing cost the small grower much
more in proportion than it did the
large grower, the oranges We're sold
through speculative merchants, and all
hope of profit was buried under the
mountain of packing charges, freights
and commissions.
Now the central exchange buys ma