CO-OPERATION IN FOOD-SUPPLY 189 



form the functions of the middleman it must acquire, 

 through its officers, the same knowledge as the good 

 middleman has. From all these considerations it will 

 be clear that co-operative dealing with produce (co- 

 operative production in the widest sense) is a very 

 complicated problem which can be mastered only by 

 a close and careful study of the conditions involved. 

 Success can be achieved only by knowledge and by 

 careful adaptation of means to an end. 



There have been many attempts to organize the 

 supply of our home country produce, and many 

 failures through not recognizing the proper starting- 

 points or from omitting to attend to some factor 

 essential to success. One rather instructive case is 

 that of an organization called the British Produce 

 Supply Association, which was started in 1896 by 

 Lord Winchilsea and other influential people under 

 the auspices of the National Agricultural Union. 

 The British Produce Supply Association was started 

 experimentally as a limited liability company with 

 a capital of ^50,000. The idea was to have first of 

 all a distributing centre in London from which pro- 

 duce could be obtained by the retail trade and by 

 private customers, and depots in the country, in charge 

 of agents who would guarantee farmers a better price 

 than they would get locally, would collect produce, 

 grade and bulk it, and dispatch it to London. It was 

 thought that this offering of better prices would incite 

 agriculturists to produce better quality, and, if they 

 could not, it was thought that the agents of the 

 association would act somewhat in the capacity of 

 technical instructors by teaching and explaining 

 methods, by distributing leaflets, and so on. Opera- 

 tions were actually started at Sleaford, in Lincoln- 

 shire, with a distributing head-quarters in Long Acre. 



But things did not happen quite as the promoters 



