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Historical Index
Cranberry Industry 1900
Low Prices and Future Cooperatives
From the Grand Rapids Tribune
Saturday April 29, 1900
Our Cranberry Growers
Low Prices and Possible Combinations, by Judge John A. Gaynor in the Milwaukee Sentinel
In reply to the Sentinel’s query, there is nothing strange in the low price of cranberries during
the past season. This phase of the industry has been gradually approcahing for some years past,
and it undoubtedly has come to stay. Of the many wild fruits that have been domesticated, and
brought into general use during the past quarter century, the cranberry is among the latest,
and it is but following the path taken by the banana, the lemon, the orange, the plum and the grape.
Every man whose memory reaches back over forty years has witnessed the enormous increase in
the production and consumption of all kinds of fruits, and in many kinds that were almost
unknown to his grandfathers. The cranberry is only one of the hundred that might be named.
The history of the development of one is the history of all.
At first the cranberry yielded to the growers large profits. This led to increased
production. The supply has at last overtaken the demand. The marketprice has sunk to the
level of the cost of production, and is likely for awhile to pass below that point, but
it cannot possibly remain there long. It will soon reach its normal level, which is a fair
compensation for the labor and skill engaged in producing it. The industry is now in the hard
school of adversity, from which it will emerge shorn of its speculative features. Those who survive
will survive on account of superior skill in producing and marketing the fruit, and I think that the
western growers have a decided advantage over their eastern competitors. In the first place we have
cheaper land, and it costs less to prepare it for planting; we have a slight advantage over them on
freights and we shal soon be able to place upon the market superior varieties.
Cranberry growing admits of unlimited increase in production, and any organization, combination or
trust formed for the purpose of increasing the price and profits, carries within itself the seeds
of its own destruction; but if this industry follows the path pursued by other fruit growing
industries, combinations will doubtless soon be formed for the purpose of lessening the cost
of production, and the cost of marketing. All this will tend towards lessening the price
without lessening the profits, and in this sens of the word “trust,” the sooner the trust
can be formed, the better it will be both for the purchaser and consumer. Already the
effort has been made to combine the growers upon the Wisconsin valley, in the matter of
grading, packaging and marketing their fruit; but the degree of organization reached is much inferior
to that already secured by the fruit growers of California, or the grape growers of New York; but we
have every reason to believe that the increase of skill and intelligence will lead to higher and
higher organization for the above purposes but nothing in the nature of an ordinary trust is possible
in this industry.
Many thanks to Joan M Benner for transcribing these pages.
Her professional page can be seen at:
Golden Rule Genealogy.
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Monday, 26-Aug-2002 20:29:45 MDT
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