While shopping today I saw a measurement that even I, the die hard English measurement guy, looked askance at. On a large carton of green peppers:
1 1/9 Bu
That’s an entirely standard size, at least in the USA, for produce cartons; both for green peppers and for all sorts of things, from standard eggplant to winter squash. Has been since long before I took up farming. I’ve got a batch of 1 1/9ths in the packing shed right now.
Why 1 1/9 is admittedly a different question. It’s true that if you pack carefully you can just about fit 25 pounds of sweet peppers or standard eggplant in a 1 1/9, while a 1 bushel box would hold an odd number of pounds; but they’re also used for winter squash, for which the weight will vary by variety. Maybe they started out as the size for 25 lbs of peppers, and then became used for other things for which the weight won’t come out even? but that’s just a guess; I don’t know the reason.
Produce is in my blood. I’ve moved thousands of these generic boxes over the years.
My longtime assumption has always been that it’s a conversion error that everyone got used to. Or rather, not an error, but an attempt not to have an error when shifting from one unit to another.
Obviously it’s because it’s equal to 313.57229 gills.
It could be an attempted conversion between Imperial bushels and one of the bewildering variety of American, Canadian, British bushels (or even among purely American bushels; no shortage of those). Just weigh the damned box…
Maybe it could be an aid for counting? If you stacked a pallet with 3X3 layers each one would be 10 bushels.
The Metric Maven also mentions that 3x3 = 10 bushels.
Update: A longtime metric advocate emailed me with an interesting hypothesis about the choice of 1 1/9 bushel boxes. It is possible that pallets with 9 boxes form a unit for “standard” stacking. This would make each unit 10 bushels. One could count up the number of stacked units and easily figure out how many bushels are on the pallet. Three levels would be 30 bushels, four would of course be 40 bushels.
It’s probably just a typo. They meant BTU (British Thermal Unit). ;-D
I would assume the 1/9 is to account for the “foreign matter” that’s probably in there that you’d rather not think about.
The USDA and/or various weights and measures departments aren’t likely to be on board with a 10% shortage.
I would guess either that, or a thought I had last night:
The old bushels were apparently round open baskets, wider than they were deep (see illustrations here). I would guess, based on what I’ve seen at modern farmers’ markets, that for many crops they were probably generally sold slightly overfilled, in that many crops (including peppers, especially if they’re not perfectly even sized and shaped) don’t pack into a perfectly level surface at the top; so either some of the peppers etc. have some portion over a level top, or else there’s some portion of vacant air at the top in order to have none of them projecting. An overfilled basket/bushel looks like the customer’s getting plenty; one filled so that none of the fruit project over the surface looks like the customer’s getting a partially filled container: so the first one sells and the second one doesn’t. (Think of peaches in a quart basket.)
So for some crops customers might well have been used to getting a bit more than a bushel in every bushel. When marketing techniques changed and people shifted to waxed cardboard boxes with tops that closed so they could be stacked – they’d be getting a little less weight/number of produce items in every box, and might well have complained about it. Maybe, to counter this, the new closing boxes were made a little bit larger, so the amount of produce in them was about the same as in a rounded open bushel.
– The stacking hypotheses is interesting; but I’ve never seen a pallet that held only 9 boxes, and I don’t think it’s usually a number divisible by 9. I don’t now remember the standard number, I haven’t sold wholesale in a while (I now sell direct-market and don’t move things in full pallets); but I remember the stacking pattern, because on one level some of the boxes go one way and others crosswise, and then on the next level you switch so the boxes lie across the ones on the layer below, which helps hold the stack together. I think it’s 5 boxes per layer, 3 one way and 2 another, and generally around 5 layers; maybe @Joey_P can tell me if I’m remembering right.
That’s certainly true at farmer’s markets, but they’re (usually) not selling things by the bushel and using those more for transportation and looks*. On the wholesale side of things, usually, but not always, items shipped in bushels will have a cover. If for no other reason, because stacking them is a lot easier.
As for stacking, I’m not sure how those are stacked as we aren’t typically buying full layers at a time of things that come in those boxes. I’ll have to keep my eyes open and see if I see full pallets of anything in delivery trucks. However, if I had to guess, I would say they’re probably shipped in a 10 block.
*and looks are important as I can guarantee many of those ‘farmers’ are just buying stuff at a local store, like mine, dumping them into bushels and reselling it.
Yes – now, and for many years now. How old is the 1 1/9, do you know? I couldn’t find that.
Ah. I thought you might have had experience making up the pallets. Your experience is with getting them after they’re made.
That depends a whole lot on what market you’re at. I’ve seen markets like that; but the ones I sell at are producer-only and local-only, 80% of what you bring has to be your own production and all of it grown within this or an adjacent county.
Details of that sort of rule vary, at least in New York State; and NY doesn’t require markets to have any such rules, some do and some don’t. I think in a couple of states if you’re going to call it a farmers’ market it has to be producer-only and local-only.
In case of doubt, ask to see a copy of the market rules. And/or ask the specific vendor; many of them will be honest about it, though I certainly can’t guarantee that all of them are.
[ETA: I could at least answer the question about how many 1 1/9 fit on one layer of a standard pallet, because I have some of both around; but the boxes are in one barn, the pallets in another, and there’s currently a good bit of unplowed unshoveled snow between them and I don’t feel like hauling some boxes around to do that right now. Maybe another day.)
Is there a list of various “standard” bushels? According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, a U.S. struck bushel is 2,150.42 cubic inches, while a U.S. heaped bushel of apples is 2,747.715 cubic inches. Is the 1 1/9 only for peppers? How much is a bushel of peppers? Wikipedia gives a list of bushels of oats, barley, maize, wheat, and soybeans, by weight, though, not volume, and still no peppers. [ETA I noticed a table of 23 different commodities, and how much is in a bushel of them according to different states as well as Canada. No peppers, but a bushel of onions is 57 lbs in New York, Wisconsin, and Iowa, but only 50 lbs in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Still not exactly 1 1/9] An Imperial bushel, for comparison, comprises 2,219.36 cubic inches.
No; as I said earlier in the thread, it’s used for a number of different vegetables. Some but not all of them are listed on the visible end of the box in the picture Joey_P posted a few posts upthread.
I feel like I’ve been seeing it forever but I really have no idea. But it’s mentioned in this report from 1962, so at least that far back, and probably a lot further.
Correct. I’m in retail. We also wholesale to other businesses, but not on that scale.
28lbs…interestingly, it also lists 1 1/9 bushel as being 28lbs.
How many pecks is that? (pickled or otherwise)
Thanks!
That does make me think that, rather than being some sort of exact conversion, it is a rough attempt to line up the weight of the carton with that of a “heaped” bushel. Compare to green beans, for instance, for which the bushel basket, carton, and crate are all supposed to weigh approximately 30 lbs—no 1/9 correction. Cf. also Honeydew melons, where “2/3 carton or crate” is 30 lbs but a “flat crate” is 35 lbs.
Other bushel units appearing there, besides 1 and 10/9, are the 1/2 bushel, 5/9 [just half of 10/9], 4/5, 7/10, 3/4 ; I probably missed some…
A bushel is four pecks (pickled or otherwise; but a bushel and a peck, when not metaphorical, are generally measures of dry things.
Unless the roof leaked in the storage place, of course.)