Proceedings of Seventeenth Normal Institute 183 



them nothing worth while is worse than never to bring them 

 together at all. I am sure we can well afford to exert considerable 

 effort in this direction. 



I say to you farm bureau men what I wrote more than a year 

 ago to the officers of the associations — that I will be glad to fur- 

 nish a speaker or instructor for such gatherings. In the dis- 

 cussion at the close of this paper, I shall appreciate an expression 

 from you as to whether it would be best to ask the associations to 

 bear the traveling expenses of such speaker, thereby insuring their 

 interest in what they pay for, or whether such asking would have 

 a discouraging effect. With the assistance and advice of the 

 farm bureau men I feel we can make gatherings of this kind 

 worth while, which I feel they have not always been when simply 

 a speaker was sent from the department. If we could get the 

 patrons to compare notes and discuss among themselves the good 

 and bad features of the associations that would do much to en- 

 gender an interest. I have suggested that a lunch be provided 

 by the locality where the meeting is held. ISTothing has a better 

 effect in making people fraternize than breaking bread together. 

 They might from time to time visit different herds and farms in 

 the territory covered by the association. All these suggestions I 

 want you to discuss. 



the association a nucleus for cooperative buying and 



selling 



Cooperation is in the air. One difficulty with many ardent 

 advocates of the plan is that they have nothing with which to 

 cooperate. Cooperative buying is much easier than cooperative 

 selling. My personal opinion is that nothing would knit the 

 members of an association more closely together than buying their 

 supplies — feed, seed, fertilizers, etc. — cooperatively. This 

 would give the officers something definite to do. I see the handi- 

 cap of the members living far apart. Would it not be possible 

 in such cases to have two or three branches of the central associa- 

 tion? Surely here we have an organization already formed, 

 with its members all furnishing a similar product, and, to a 

 greater or less degree, all working along similar lines. Were I 

 in charge of cooperative work, I should direct my first efforts to 

 working with existing organizations, rather than to starting new 

 and independent ones. 



