“Derby Says Limit Peach Production” from the Nov. 7, 1924 issue of The
Pilot, Vass, N.C.
Thinks Crop Should Be Held Down to What Market Takes Freely
I have just returned and read the article in the Sept. 5th
issue of The Pilot entitled “Is the Orchard Overdone?” in which you take issue
with me on the question of production of peaches.
There are several points that I would like to clear up in
this connection and as I believe the whole matter deserves the widest possible
discussion in the local press I am very glad to write this open letter to you
which I hope you will see fit to publish. I want to discuss the matter in
perfect good humor on account of you and the pleasant relations I have always
had with you so that any little pleasantries that I pass out should be taken in
good part. We once argued in the public press the question of whether or not
you deserved to hung without a lynching taking place and as you escaped the
gallows I expect my idea of a proper punishment for you was wrong. While we are
discussing personalities I might say that in my opinion your vision and
enthusiasm are and have been very valuable assets to this community and I am
very glad that you were NOT hung. However it is possible for even a prophet and
the Sage of the Sandhills to be sometimes wrong and when he is I want to assist
in setting him right.
It seems to me that the responsibility of the press is a
very great one and that when a writer undertakes to advise such a community as
this on a fundamental economic policy he should be very sure of his facts. This
is especially true when one is dealing with farmers, for as a class they have
less cohesion than any other class in our civilization and the development of
public opinion among them is an extremely difficult matter. Therefore I want to
get down to the fats in this matter of production of peaches and stick to them,
leaving generalities and sweeping prophesies as to the future alone.
In the first place you start your article by misquoting me.
I never have made the assertion that the Sandhills are producing too many
peaches. What I have said is that the South was producing too many peaches and
that the present acreage planted in this district will produce all we can hope
to market at a profit and that this acreage should not be increased. I took
this position two years ago and still maintain it and I believe that the
experience of last summer has proved my position to be correct. Of course it is
not a popular stand to take. Being a Cassandra never went down very well in
America but that happens to make no difference to me whatever. I would a good
deal rather be right than insincere.
You go on in your article to say that the trouble is not
with overproduction but with an imperfect system of marketing and you lead your
reads to believe that in some way the
community can improve this so that 50,000 cars of peaches can be sold as easily
as we used to sell our 300 or 400 carloads. You compare our problem to the
marketing of beef which you say is an equally perishable product as peaches.
This comparison seems to me to be unworthy of your
intelligence and indicates that you are guessing about the question and not
boring down after the cold hard facts. Beef is really not a particularly
perishable product. It can be frozen and kept in cold storage indefinitely. It
can be and is slaughtered whenever the occasion demands. If we could leave our
peaches on the trees for twelve months and pick them when the market demanded
them or pick them and store them under low temperatures for an indefinite
period, then I would agree that our problem would be much simplified and would
approach a comparison with the beef industry.
Moreover beef is a necessity in the diet of the nation that
really has no substitute. Meat has a stimulating effect that most people
believe is the source of energy and endurance of our very vigorous people. But
for peaches there are dozens of substitutes, both fresh and preserved that can
answer the same purpose equally as well. It is well known that cantaloupes are
serious competitors of peaches and in this connection it might be well to point
out that we peach growers were very fortunate during the market gluts of the
past season in that the cantaloupe crop was short and poor. Otherwise we would
have had an even more disastrous experience than we had.
You also lead your readers to believe that one solution of
our problem would be to can our product. This is a very common illusion among
people who really don’t know anything about the peach business. Our fresh fruit
varieties such as Belle, Hiley and Elbertas are not suitable for canning. This
is a well known fact which I am surprised that more people do not recognize.
These varieties do not hold their shapes when put up n cans but break own into
a frayed, mushy mass that is not acceptable to the public. I grant you that the
flavor, when properly prepared, is superior to the ordinary hard meaty
California canning peach but unfortunately the public will not accept them.
California when through this same experience years ago with
the same varieties that we are growing here and finally developed a special
peach for drying and canning. You wonder why we should not do the same. Well,
that is worth looking into but first we should determine whether we can enter
this special line of agriculture with any hope of success. Raising canning
peaches is a very different matter than raising fresh fruit. Colour, which is
an essential for fresh fruit is of no consequence in canned fruit. The
important considerations are the size of the individual specimens and the yield
per tree. In California in the peach canning districts they get a very much
larger yield per tree than we do here on account of the stronger land, and, in
my opinion this is the stumbling block that would prevent our hoping to compete
with California in this line. At all events it would take years of
experimentation and a great deal of special knowledge and investigation before
we could enter the canning peach industry. I object to your sweeping and off
hand assertion that to can our peaches is a solution of our difficulties.
Now as to marketing. You again make a sweeping assertion to
the effect that we should do something to improve it so that more peaches can
be sold at a profit and one would infer form what you say, that our present
methods are very inefficient. In this I totally disagree.
It is utterly impossible for a district that has a product
to market over a period of only three weeks in a year to build up an
organization of its own to handle the business. This has been tried time and
again by various districts and has always proved a failure. Our own experience
in this line should have taught us the lesson in conclusive fashion. For such a
district as ours the only solution is to employ a marketing organization that
is constantly in the field and that has the connections and trained personnel
to handle the job efficiently. This was done last year by the American Growers
and the Federated Growers and done as well as it could be done. Contrary to
what you would have your readers believe they put our product everywhere. Of
course there were many people that did not get Sandhill peaches 1,500 carloads
will not supply the whole country, but the consuming public had plenty of
peaches during our shipping season as anyone could ascertain by simply looking
at the fruit stands and push carts in the big centers of the country.
This is a well established fact that is recognized by
everybody.
One would also infer from your article that something was
wrong with the country’s system of getting fruit into the hands of the public
after it reaches the big centers. If you walk down any if the busy streets of
any good-sized American town the thing that impresses you is the multitude of
fruit stands, for the most part run by Italians. You wonder how they all manage
to make a living at it. This summer in Portland, Maine, I had fruit thrust at me
on every corner. I don’t believe than any middleman is in closer touch with the
consuming public than is the Italian fruit vendor. He sets up a stand in any
nook or corner available, he puts his wares out in the open close to the
passerby and he is always in attendance in his white coat urging the public to
buy. Or he pushes his long cart through the crowded streets taking his wares to
the very doorstep of the purchaser. In fact I don’t believe that any product
has a more complete distributing system than fruit has in this country or more
efficient and enterprising salesmen to dispose of it.
In seasons like the past one generally hears a wail raised
by the growers against the middlemen and the railroads. These are easy people
to blame for all the troubles of the business but I cannot see quite how the
responsibility for raising more stuff than can be consumed is to be fixed on
them. The middleman is vital to the success of the perishable fruit grower.
Without him to take a share of the risk and to unload the stuff on the public
we would be in a sorry plight indeed. Nor is the business all beer and skittles
for him. The large number of failures in this line is proof enough that his end
is quite risky, if not more risky, than the growers’ end.
LaFollette and his crew of radicals blame the railroads and
Wall Street for the condition of the wheat market and the hard times of the
Western farmer when every thinking man knows that what ails the wheat farmer is
too much wheat and nothing much else.
We have never experienced an agricultural crisis in this
country that was not directly caused by overproduction. The corn famine in
Kansas in the nineties was due to an overproduction of corn. Then the farmers
burnt their cornstalks for fuel as they were cheaper than wood or coal. The
opening up of our fertile West during and after the Civil War virtually
prostrated agriculture in the East and for that matter in Europe as well. Why?
Simply because those rich lands yielded more and at less expense than the worn
out soils of an older civilization and because the free homesteads upon which
the settler had no interest on the investment to pay and no mortgage to clear
was a more profitable investment than the capitalized farms of an older
civilization.
The potentiality of this great country from the point of
view of the production of all kinds of crops is still enormous. If it were all
farmed intensively agriculture would be ruined. Make no mistake about that. Our
government has fostered agriculture by encouraging the farmer to produce more
and more, to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, regardless of
whether the second blade could be sold at a profit or sold at all. By giving
away the homesteads to settle the West, by numerous reclamation projects, by
teaching and preaching better and cheaper methods of production our government
has assisted mightily in developing the greatest country on earth but it is
only natural that such a program should bring its periods of suffering for the
producing classes.
I am not blaming or criticizing the policy of the government
in this. I am merely stating that I believe to be facts and attempting to point
out the dangers that a community like ours may run into. Only by knowing the
truth about the past can we safeguard the future.
The question, as I see it, is whether we in this section
should not take stock and the possibility of marketing what we will produce on
the present acreage planted and plan our future as intelligently as any large
business concern plans its future.
No manufacturing concern goes ahead with a program of
production without consulting its sales department to find out how much can be
sold. Yet the peach grower goes blindly ahead planting trees without the
dimmest idea of where or how his product is to be marketed four or five years
later. True, you cannot control this by legislation or by any other direct
method, but if the press has the welfare of the section it serves really at
heart and is honest and candid and not serving the ends of real estate speculators
or railroads that are pursuing a policy of too rapid development, it can
present the facts to the public and the public can judge for itself.
Let us profit by the experience of the Georgia peach growers
and the Washington and Oregon apple growers and the Florida citrus growers and
the California lemon growers before it is too late and we smash half the banks
in the district and send a lot of disgruntled settlers back to the North with
empty pockets and a cordial feeling of dislike for our beautiful section.
If you will consult the United States Bureau of Markets in
the Department of Agriculture in Washington, they will tell you all the facts
in the matter and support them with figures that are conclusive. I have
discussed the whole question with them from A to Izzard and I haven’t found a
man in the Bureau who is anything but a pessimist about the immediate future of
the peach situation in the South or the citrus industry. Last week in
Washington I was told by one of the men high up in the Bureau that in his
opinion not more than 60 percent of a normal apple crop could be marketed at
profitable prices in this country today. He supports this assertion by pointing
to the present crop which is going at profitable prices and which is only 60
percent of a normal crop.
The unfortunate thing is that the very accurate information
that these men have in Washington cannot be presented to the farmers officially
because of the political pressure that would immediately brought on the
Department by real estate operators and the railroads if anything were said
that might tend to discourage additional planting or break a real estate boom.
The blight of any fruit district is the man who wants to
sell land rather than enter seriously into the production of fruit. We have
such people here and if they were given enough rein they would land this
district on the rocks as sure as shooting. How much harm have they actually
done us remains to be seen.
It is a pity that the U.S. Bureau of Markets cannot be
invited by the fruit producing districts of the South to make a survey of
present planting and production and report on the condition and probable future
of the industry. Such information would be accepted by the public as
disinterested whereas if an individual or group of individuals attempt to
supply such information the public assumes that they have some special end to
serve.
How you can blink the fact that Georgia filed to market
between four and six thousand carloads of peaches this past season and actually
left them to rot in the orchards because the prices at the terminal markets
would not pay the freight and contend that there was no overproduction of
peaches is beyond me. Everybody that has looked into the situation recognizes
the truth. The Georgia and South Carolina Peach Exchanges recognize it so well
that they have issued statements in the public press to the effect that there
is an overproduction and are urging a moratorium on planting so that no
additional fruit shall come in before 1932.
You are kind enough to state that I am no coward. I trust
that I am not but when I consider the situation before us in the peach business
I feel like one. Frankly I would get out if I could. Not being able to do so
however, I shall do what I can to see the proposition through, taking care of
my own interests first of all and helping others where and when I can. At
present I believe the biggest assistance I can be to others is to present the
facts about the industry as I see them. I felt this two years ago when I hired
space in the local press together with others who felt as I did and advised
against an extension of the industry here. You may not believe it, but I did
not take this action with the idea that it would assist me in getting votes in
case I decided to run for Congress or to be elected dog catcher.
I am neither so stupid or so selfish as to want to be only
one of a handful of people who have the peach market to themselves. Under such
conditions it would be extremely difficult to succeed. We are all benefited by
each others’ experience in this business and unless we have trained labour at
our command we cannot operate as efficiently as we should. There is a great
advantage in operating in a district composed of intelligent and efficient
growers who set a high standard of quality for their fruit.
Two other misstatements you made were that the car of
peaches I shipped to England made a hit and that I come of a family that used
to catch whales. The car we shipped to England sold very slowly and the fruit
was not appreciated by the public. The net return was not sufficient to warrant
the enormous risk taken in shipping across the water and I doubt if I ever try
it again. As for the whales, my ancestors never caught any that I am aware of.
They were East India traders up till the war of 1812 when they had the good
sense to get out of the shipping business. So far as I know I am the only Jonah
that my family has produced.
With kindest regards, Sincerely yours, Roger A. Derby,
October 25th, 1924
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