190 Repoet of Farmers' Institutes 



THE NECESSITY FOR COOPERATION IN AGRICULTURE 

 Professor G. IsT. Lauman 



It is the custom in business to take an inventory at the end 

 of a financial year. In fact, the value of such a record is so 

 great that many business houses now have perpetual inventories. 

 These are concerned with the stocks and supplies on hand, and 

 are designed to give a complete record of the physical property 

 at regular intervals. Since efficiency and scientific management 

 have become watchwords in business, we are taking stock of other 

 assets hitherto little regarded. We are attempting to judge of our 

 stock of non-material assets. This is not a new procedure which 

 the twentieth century has invented, for, with ever increasing 

 stress, our histories and later our social science has attempted 

 this. They have inventoried the general and specific mental and 

 moral characteristics of man in general, and specific races and 

 nations in particular. Almost everybody at present is doing this 

 very thing; not with the humility enjoined by the Bible, and not 

 with the proper perspective on beams and splinters. 



There is no greater nor more important asset in agriculture 

 than the farmers' individuality, which is in considerable degTce a 

 result of the conditions of his life. It is sometimes called an 

 elemental character. Certainly in last analysis it is the character 

 above all others that, in ever varying conditions and in all stages 

 of development, is the most valuable to him, his country and 

 mankind in general. Instinctively we imitate, from childhood 

 to death; one race apes another, and, according to some, there 

 can be but one civilization worth while. In all these forces 

 making for uniformity, the farmer stands out in his individuality, 

 both personal and as a class. 



In the United States the pioneer days accentuated this indi- 

 viduality born of the soil. The pioneer was the highest type of 

 the individualist of his time. His very lack of contact with men 

 and ideas made him rely upon himself all the more. 



With the coming of a changing agriculture tending toward the 

 permanency that follows pioneering, with the revolutionary 

 methods of transportation of materials, and men, and ideas, the 



