Seventy-Third Annual Report 1281 



labor and capital employed in your industry. The difficulties 

 which confront the farmers in this state, are practically the same 

 all over the United States, 



The penalties annually exacted from American farmers, be- 

 cause of the absence of cooperative effort in the handling, financ- 

 ing and marketing of their farm products, amounts to hundreds 

 of millions of dollars. 



You need your cooperative societies for marketing direct to the 

 retailers and consumers in this country, the same as have been so 

 highly perfected in Denmark and other European agricultural 

 countries. 



RURAL CREDITS AND BANKING 



The products of the American farmer, as a rule, are bought, 

 but never sold. The most powerful obstacle to overcome in blaz- 

 ing the pathway to modern and economic methods of marketing, 

 is the ruinous credit system which has so notoriously prevailed as 

 a bulwark of destruction in all parts of the United States for 

 the past 50 years. 



The credit system as employed by American farmers is not only 

 primitive and out of date, but it has persistently kept the pro- 

 ducers of the agricultural wealth as much enslaved and as helpless 

 in the proper distribution of their products as were the peasants 

 during the decadence of the Roman Empire. 



The economic solution of this vexed question lies in the coopera- 

 tion of farmers along modern business lines, and the inauguration 

 of a sane and sound system of cooperative credit and finance, 

 which will enable American farmers to be the masters in the dis- 

 tribution of the products of their farms. It is done successfully 

 in other countries, and I believe that American farmers have as 

 much business training, sound and practical judgment and com- 

 mon sense as the farmers of European countries, who have so 

 successfully solved the problems of production, finance and dis- 

 tribution. There is already commendable progress along these 

 lines being made, in the successful establishment of cooperative 

 stores and granaries in the western states, and in the organiza- 

 tion of a system of cooperative cotton warehouses and cotton hand- 

 ling companies in the South. 



Secretary James Wilson, in a recent report to congress, esti- 

 mates the gross value of the agricultural products in the United 



