Weekly journal-miner., 1919-08-06
MARKETING CARE ADDS MUCH
 TO VALUE OF HOME PROTECTS

One dealer told me of buying a lot of Yavapai potatoes that proved to be nearly all too small to be market able and mixed generously with Jumps of dry dirt; another told ot frozen potatoes which he bought from a home grower and found most of them unfit for use.
 A year ago we were offered large quantity of potatoes for hog feed. ItI was when spuds were sky-high in price but the owner complained that no one in Prescott would buy them from him. We took them out to the ranch and opened up the sacks; there
 were what had been literally hun dreds of dollars worth of fine big potatoes of excellent quality mixed with dirt, small stones, and all the tiny potatoes. All were dirty and looked as if they had been shovellei out of the rows into the sacks. The grower lost many times what 1t would have cost him to sort and wash his crop, grade it properly as to size, and get it into the hands of merchants who that winter had been. paying big prices for spuds not nearly so good | As a matter of fact smaller vegetables
 that are clean will out-sell big ones
 that are dirty.
 When beans were at the top-notch
 price during the war we were offered ] hundreds of pounds of beans far be-
 low market price. They were an eN-
 ceptionally fine quality of white
 beans. almost as marketable just then
 as gold nuggets; but they were mixed
 with two or three shades and grades
 of colored beans and with a liberal allowance of small stones and dry
 earth and were not marketable at any
 Drice. A little care in the harvesting
 would have made them valuable crop, as it was they were worthless
 on the market One old-time Pres
 colt dealer who has always made 1t a rule to buy in tine county when pos
 sible lost good trade by delivering
 sacks of beans of this sort without
 knowing that the rancher had worked
 such lot off on him.
 Now, California growers clean and grade their beans and put them on the market in dependable shape. We
 must learn to do the same if we ea- r pect to sell; one man who sells dirty beans full of small stones and clod'
 spells the market for all his neigh bors as well as for himself in the 4 future. We can't afford to do it, and we can't, in justice, blame the dealers if they get afraid of home growr stuff that isn't put up right.
 l I know that our smaller ranches
 Hack the: machinery for preparing = some things for market which E I found in older farming regions bu ? we can take extra care that our stuf !. is in a grade that can be sold thougt g it does mean extra work and thought r il noticed in one store a lot O . string beans in which witnered an' g rusted beans and broken stems anC e leaves were mixed with the gooC ' beans: the dealer said the box ha( ] come in that way with bunch O country stuff. Now that box wa e going to be pretty near dead los! l to him because no one wanted them a housekeeper buying mess Of string c beans for family don't want to sor n out a quarter that were never fit fo l use. It would have paid the ranche c to sort them at nome, send in boz
 of fine looking stuff, and have wei e come next time he wanted to scl something.
 d I saw bunch of green corn, toe f that was a dead loss to the merchan . because it was field, not sweet corn s and was a little too old for table Us y anyway. Some field corn is yer. f good eating burt it is not marketabl c for city sales and merchant who l
 caught by it once is not going to bu. s of that farmer again. Sweet cor r has been exceedingly hard to gro' r in Yavapai because of the corn worm h bat now that science has demonstrat h ed how the worms can be eliminate f by dusting the young ear with dr 0 arscnate of lead it should be poSelbl c to put fine home grown sweet cor Il OH the market. Our native India e corns arc deliciously sweet and hardi
 CT than other varieties; with gree corn at five cents an ear every sum 2 mer it ought to pay to plant just 10
 market
 5 One suggestion which all cXper \ enccd dealer in fruits and vegetable B made is so good that it would b E worth repeating many times. H \ sells perhaps as much such stuff a ] 1ny man in Prescott. He said tha E his hardest trouble with home pro E ducers was to get them to let hi b know a few days ahead of time ju' k what day they would be in town all
 what they would bring in for sal ' Knowing this he could plan ahead : use their stuff and not have to tur T them away because he had oil han
 already all that he could hope to SC
 before it would spoil