The Fruit Is Rotting on the Vines While Seattle Buys California Canned Goods
A Vashon grower and the Post-Intelligencer make the case for a Puget Sound cannery before another harvest spoils on the ground.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In another column will be found a communication from Mr. P. B. Nye, of Vashon, urging the necessity for the establishment of one or more fruit canneries on Puget Sound.
Mr. Nye is right in this matter. The amount of fruit which is going to waste during the present season in Western Washington for want of a market cannot be estimated. Its value certainly is very great, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. The fruit is allowed to rot in the orchards and on the vines, simply because it does not pay to pick it at the prices which it will now command in the markets on the Sound.
While this is true, it is equally true that we are annually sending away to California and to the East hundreds of thousands of dollars for canned fruits. This money might as well be kept here and scattered among our fruit growers. Indeed, the balance of trade ought to be changed, and instead of sending money abroad for our canned fruits, money ought to be received from abroad for fruits grown and canned here.
The amount of capital necessary to equip a cannery properly is not great. That one cannery, or more than one, could be profitably conducted on the Sound is certain. Another fruit season should not be allowed to pass as this has done, with the fruit rotting on the hands of the growers for want of a market.
To the Editor: The farmers here are and must continue to be largely fruit growers, and the question that is with them through the day and sleeps with them at night is: What shall we do with our fruit? Where and how shall we dispose of it in such a manner that we can derive something in return for the labor of producing it? This year has already demonstrated beyond a doubt to every reasonable man that raising fruit and forcing it upon the market here through the hands of commission merchants with the expectation of making a living thereby is a dismal failure.
The fruit growers of Western Washington must have canneries to take care of their surplus fruit, or else they must unite as communities and ship it East in car lots, or quit the business—and to quit the business means to quit this part of the country.
Why is it that some of our enterprising business men who have money to invest have never built a cannery in the state of Washington? It is a humiliating comment upon our enterprise to say that the canneries in British Columbia send agents down here to buy fruit to can. They ship their crates down here and pay duty on them, then pay $30 per ton for strawberries, pay their own freight and 2 cents per pound duty on the berries, and then can them at a good profit. In the face of these facts, why in heaven's name can't we run a cannery here?
Now is the time to work up this question. Let us agitate it and see if we cannot arrive at some practical solution of this problem and be prepared for next year's crop. — F. S. NYE.
“The fruit is allowed to rot in the orchards and on the vines, simply because it does not pay to pick it at the prices which it will now command in the markets on the Sound.”
In 1894 Western Washington could grow fruit faster than it could sell it, and the money for canned goods flowed south to California and east to the rest of the country. The argument—build the processing here, keep the value here—is the same one behind today's push for local food systems and regional food hubs. The canneries came, and then most of them went, leaving the perennial question of what a region does with its abundance.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.