shipping fruit on railroad branches

In a recent exchange discussing the shipping of fruit and attempting to match the data on refrigerator cars in trains on DRGW branch lines. If the DRGW mirrored the SP, shipments may have been made by other car types

My friend's father, the late Raymond Pugsley, was a fruit expert and was hired by the big orchard concern Harry and David in Southern Oregon from his original home and work around Yuba City, CA. He related to me that in times of car shortages or for convenience they would sometimes ship by stock car. His industry experience would have begun in the 20's and continued to and beyond my meeting him around 1975.

I assume this was for the added ventilation over a box car and suspect was only used for less perishable fruit and shorter shipping distance. But in the days before shippers had access to large refrigerated warehouses, risking shipping by less than ideal transport was apparently preferable to not shipping at all. So records only by car type may disguise fruit or other shipments.