CO-OPERATION IN FOOD-SUPPLY 183 



with these processes each commodity and each of the 

 different processes it has to pass through has to be 

 gone into and studied separately. All that side of 

 agricultural co-operation, therefore what you may 

 call generally co-operative marketing becomes a very 

 much more complicated problem than the supply of 

 necessaries and of credit to the agriculturist, a problem 

 which people have tried to solve here and there many 

 times, and have very often failed. The easiest and 

 least dangerous way to attack it is for a co-operative 

 society to deal, in the first place, with a single article. 

 There are many examples of this, one excellent ex- 

 ample being the Irish dairies, which have been estab- 

 lished under the Irish Agricultural Organization 

 Society by Sir Horace Plunkett and his fellow-workers. 

 These co-operative creameries, in which butter is made 

 from the farmers' milk and then distributed, have been 

 such an extraordinary success that capitalists have 

 imitated them and laid down creameries on exactly the 

 same lines, and between the two this field in Ireland 

 has been pretty completely covered for some years 

 now. Nearly all the milk produced in Ireland, except 

 that locally consumed, is turned into butter at cream- 

 eries of this type. In England the conditions are 

 different, and it pays the English dairy farmer much 

 better to send his milk straight to the towns for direct 

 consumption. Here, of course, there is still a field 

 for co-operation in the collection and delivery of milk, 

 but the marketing of milk is in an exceptional posi- 

 tion because of its vital importance to the inhabitants, 

 of the towns. Because this matter is of such vital 

 interest to the consumer there has been an important 

 movement to bring it under the control of the muni- 

 cipal authorities or of the State, with a view to con- 

 trolling the price and even to controlling both price 

 and distribution. It must be remembered that a co- 



