The New York herald., 1922-09-24

DliuSep 1 We IdiSeu pretty HuSAi
everything that folks mas to buy that kin
be produced in this belt-there amt much
OF anything that don't get just the same
sort of spread that pork meat does on the
way from the farm to the city tables.
Take apples for example Bananas may
be the first fruit of the poor-or they
may not if you don't strike em on push
cart on Sat'day afternoon; but the good
old apple, red. yellow or green. comes near
bein the fruit of the middle class Cancel
apples from the American dietary, an
you'd bust up the whole show. An the
jugglin' that's done with apples, between
the orchard an the town pie is sin to
bring tears to the eyes The trouble is,
just as it is with every other article of
food. that the consumption has grown to
more complicated the system an the more
chanst of squeezin' the feller that has to
eat Pretty near every State in the Union
grows apples more or less but for the sake
Of maxim it clear I'm stickin' to the apples
OF New York State which when all is said
an done produces more than any of the
rest It'd take a set of books to tell the
whole story. All / want is to show how
the game is, played
For instance, in 1920. for some of Ma
ture's mysterious reasons, there was a
whala, of an apple crop all over the East
The year before the big operators had got
an awful stingin' in the English market,
for we ship a powerful lot of apples to
England They was lookin' fer chanst
to git even, an by havin' the orchards
everywhere inspected in the buddin' sea-
son they see there was gonta be a huge
crop.
They found out too that England didn't
have no apples at all. The thing was
Ienced up on every angle. The coopers
was consolidated an stuck the price of
barrels that used to be thirty-two cents
before the war up to a dollar an a half
at the beginnin' of the season. an every
thing was cash. which a farmer in the
CROWN season usually amt got. an if he
had million barrels of fruit hangin' on
his trees he needn't to bother to go to the
local bank to look fer a dollar
Then the play began. Almost any sea-
automobiles carryin apple buyers around.
goin' from one orchard to another. In
August almost any farmer that's got an
orchard has two or three BUYERS cars
parked in front of his house an holds a
little auction of his own. That year never
a buyer showed up. None, no, not any.
You'd have thought one or two might have
jumped the fence an bought, when the
stuff began to beg fer a buyer but no-no.
1t was the greatest case of thought trans
ference the world ever seen. On'y the
word was circulated from somewhere that
the price was gonta be s175 a barrel
which was just the price of the barrel
alone
Time went on. The early apples come
along, an there was nobody to buy EN-
The farmers let 'em rot, mostly-fine
Gravensteins an Alexanders and Duchess
of Oldenburgh. They had to. Just enough
was bought to keep the fruit stand man
supplied but payin' high price, an the
public eatin' one at the peril of its life.
The months went by. The English Gov
ernment. which looks after its farmers a
little. had put maximum on the price Of
apples from this side, but before it went
on they was bringin' as high as a hunderd
shillin's in London. An still the apple
buyers didn't slow up. still the coopers
stuck tight. an the finest crop of winter
apples the East had ever seen begun to
fall in the autumn gales an rot on the
ground
The Problem in City and Country.